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GREEK GENIUS 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 



BOOKS BY 
JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 



EMERSON AND OTHER ESSAYS. 

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GREEK GENIUS AND OTHER ES- 
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MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY 
NEW YORK 



GREEK GENIUS 

AND OTHER ESSAYS 



BY 

JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 



NEW YORK 

MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY 

1915 






Copyright, 191 5, by 
John Jay Chapman 




NOV'27 i3i5 

©GIA 114877 



t?(> 






CONTENTS 

I Euripides and the Greek page 

Genius i 

1 Introduction 3 

2 False Guides 7 

3 The Alcestis 19 

4 The Bacchantes .... 45 

5 The Greek Chorus— Horror 
and Irony y^t 

6 Gilbert Murray— Oxford . 97 

7 Conclusion 125 

II Shakespeare 133 

1 The Greek Stage and Shake- 
speare 135 

2 Shakespeare's Vehicle . .141 

3 Each Play a World . . .157 

4 Troilus and Crcssida . .173 

5 The Melancholy Plays . .191 

6 Shakespeare's Influence . . 207 
III Balzac 219 

1^1 



CONTENTS 

IV La Vie Parisienne . . . .291 

1 The Women 293 

2 Wicked, Lovely Paris . . . 300 

3 The Damned 303 

4 Abbes and Cups of Choco- 
late 306 

5 The Creative Work of Aliens 309 

6 The Poor Indian . . . .314 



t^l 



EURIPIDES AND THE 
GREEK GENIUS 



INTRODUCTION 

THE teasing perfection of Greek Liter- 
ature will perhaps excite the world 
long after modern literature is forgotten. 
Shakespeare may come to his end and lie 
down among the Egyptians, but Homer will 
endure forever. We hate to imagine such 
an outcome, because, while we love Shake- 
speare, we regard the Greek classics merely 
with an overwhelmed astonishment. But 
the fact is that Homer floats in the central 
stream of History, Shakespeare in an eddy. 
There is, too, a real difference between an- 
cient and modern art, and the enduring 
power may be on the side of antiquity. 

The classics will always be the playthings 
of humanity, because they are types of per- 
fection, like crystals. They are pure intel- 
lect, like demonstrations in geometry. 
Within their own limitations they are exam- 
ples of miracle; and the modern world has 
nothing to show that resembles them in the 
least. As no builder has built like the 
E3] 



GREEK GENIUS 

Greeks, so no writer has written like the 
Greeks. In edge, in deHcacy, in proportion, 
in accuracy of effect, they are as marble to 
our sandstone. The perfection of the Greek 
vehicle is what attacks the mind of the mod- 
ern man and gives him dreams. 

What relation these dreams bear to Greek 
feeling it is impossible to say,— probably a 
very remote and grotesque relation. The 
scholars who devote their enormous ener- 
gies in a life-and-death struggle to under- 
stand the Greeks always arrive at states of 
mind which are peculiarly modern. The same 
thing may be said of the severest types of 
Biblical scholar. David Friedrich Strauss, for 
instance, gave his life to the study of Christ, 
and, as a result, has left an admirable picture 
of the German mind of 1850. Goethe, who 
was on his guard if ever a man could be, has 
still been a little deceived in thinking that 
the classic spirit could be recovered. He has 
left imitations of Greek literature which are 
admirable in themselves, and rank among 
his most characteristic works, yet which 
bear small resemblance to the originals. The 
same may be said of Milton and of Racine. 
The Greeks seem to have used their material, 
their myths and ideas, with such supernal 
intellect that they leave this material un- 
[4] 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

touched for the next comer. Their gods 
persist, their mythology is yours and mine. 
We accept the toys,— the whole babyhouse 
which has come down to us : we walk in and 
build our own dramas with their blocks. 

What a man thinks of influences him, 
though he chance to know little about it ; and 
the power which the ancient world has 
exerted over the modern has not been shown 
in proportion to the knowledge or scholar- 
ship of the modern thinker, but in propor- 
tion to his natural force. The Greek 
tradition, the Greek idea became an element 
in all subsequent life; and one can no more 
dig it out and isolate it than one can dig out 
or isolate a property of the blood. We do 
not know exactly how much we owe to the 
Greeks. Keats was inspired by the very idea 
of them. They were an obsession to Dante, 
who knew not the language. Their achieve- 
ments have been pressing in upon the mind 
of Europe, and enveloping it with an atmo- 
spheric appeal, ever since the Dark Ages. 

Of late years we have come to think of all 
subjects as mere departments of science, and 
we are almost ready to hand over Greece to 
the specialist. We assume that scholars will 
work out the history of art. But it is not the 
right of the learned and scholarly only, to be 

L5l 



GREEK GENIUS 

influenced by the Greeks, but also of those 
persons who know no Greek. Greek influ- 
ence is too universal an inheritance to be 
entrusted to scholars, and the specialist is the 
very last man who can understand it. In 
order to obtain a diagnosis on Greek influ- 
ence one would have to seek out a sort of 
specialist on Humanity-at-large. 



1:63 



II 

FALSE GUIDES 

SINCE we cannot find any inspired 
teacher to lay before us the secrets of 
Greek influence, the next best thing would 
be to go directly to the Greeks themselves, 
and to study their works freshly, almost in- 
nocently. But to do this is not easy. The 
very Greek texts themselves have been estab- 
lished through modern research, and the 
foot-notes are the essence of modernity. 

The rushing modern world passes like an 
express train ; as it goes, it holds up a mirror 
to the classic world,— a mirror ever chang- 
ing and ever false. For upon the face of the 
mirror rests the lens of fleeting fashion. We 
can no more walk straight to the Greeks than 
we can walk straight to the moon. In 
America the natural road to the classics lies 
through the introductions of German and 
English scholarship. We are met, as it 
were, on the threshold of Greece by guides 
who address us confidently in two very dis- 

1:73 



GREEK GENIUS 

similar modern idioms, and who overwhelm 
us with complacent and voluble instructions. 
According to these men we have nothing to 
do but listen to them, if we would under- 
stand Greece. 

Before entering upon the subject of 
Greece, let us cast a preliminary and disil- 
lusioning glance upon our two guides, the 
German and the Briton. Let us look once at 
each of them with an intelligent curiosity, so 
that we may understand what manner of 
men they are, and can make allowances in 
receiving the valuable and voluble assistance 
which they keep whispering into our ears 
throughout the tour. The guides are indis- 
pensable ; but this need not prevent us from 
studying their temperaments. If it be true 
that modern scholarship acts as a lens 
through which the classics are to be viewed, 
we can never hope to get rid of all the distor- 
tions; but we may make scientific allow- 
ances, and may correct results. We may 
consider certain social laws of refraction; 
for example, spectacles, beer, sausages. We 
may regard the variations of the compass 
due to certain local customs, namely: the 
Anglican communion, School honour. Pears' 
soap. In all this we sin not, but pursue in- 
tellectual methods. 

1^2 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

The case of Germany illustrates the laws 
of refraction very pleasantly. The extraor- 
dinary lenses which were made there in the 
nineteenth century are famous now, and will 
remain as curiosities hereafter. During the 
last century, Learning won the day in Ger- 
many to an extent never before known in 
history. It became an unwritten law of the 
land that none but learned men should be 
allowed to play with pebbles. If a man had 
been through the mill of the Doctorate, 
however, he received a certificate as a 
dreamer. The passion which mankind has 
for using its imagination could thus be grati- 
fied only by men who had been brilliant 
scholars. The result was a race of monsters, 
of whom Nietzsche is the greatest. 

The early social life of these men was 
contracted. They learned all they knew 
while sitting on a bench. The classroom was 
their road to glory. They were aware that 
they could not be allowed to go out and play 
in the open until they had learned their les- 
sons thoroughly ; they therefore became prize 
boys. When the great freedom was at last 
conferred upon them, they roamed through 
Greek mythology, and all other mythologies, 
and erected labyrinths in which the passions 
of childhood may be seen gambolling with 

1:93 



GREEK GENIUS 

the discoveries of adult miseducation. The 
gravity with which the pundits treated each 
other extended to the rest of the world, be- 
cause, in the first place, they were more 
learned than any one else, and in the second, 
several of them wxre men of genius. The 
"finds" of modern archaeology have passed 
through the hands of these men, and have 
received from them the labels of current 
classification. 

After all, these pundits resemble their 
predecessors in learning. Scholarship is al- 
ways a specialised matter, and it must be 
learned as we learn a game. Scholarship 
always wears the parade of finality, and yet 
suffers changes like the moon. These par- 
ticular scholars are merely scholars. Their 
errors are only the errors of scholarship, 
due, for the most part, to extravagance and 
to ambition. A new idea about Hellas 
meant a new reputation. In default of such 
an idea a man's career is manqnee; he is not 
an intellectual. After discounting ambition, 
we have left still another cause for distrust- 
ing the labours of the German professors. 
This distrust arises from a peep into the 
social surroundings of the caste. Here is a 
great authority on the open-air life of the 
Greeks: he knows all about Hellenic sport. 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

Here is another who understands the bril- 
Hant social Hf e of Attica : he has written the 
best book upon Athenian conversation and 
the market-place. Here is still a third: he 
has reconstructed Greek religion : at last we 
know ! All these miracles of learning have 
been accomplished in the library, — without 
athletics, without conversation, without re- 
ligion. 

When I think of Greek civilisation, of the 
swarming, thieving, clever, gleaming-eyed 
Greeks, of the Bay of Salamis, and of the 
Hermes of Praxiteles,— and then cast my 
eyes on the Greatest Authority, my guide, 
my Teuton master, with his barbarian babble 
and his ham-bone and his self-importance, 
I begin to wonder whether I cannot some- 
how get rid of the man and leave him be- 
hind. Alas, we cannot do that ; we can only 
remember his traits. 

Our British mentors, who flank the Ger- 
man scholars as we move gently forward 
toward Greek feeling, form so complete a 
contrast to the Teutons that we hardly be- 
lieve that both kinds can represent genuine 
scholarship. The Britons are gentlemen, 
afternoon callers, who eat small cakes, row 
on the Thames, and are all for morality. 
They are men of letters. They write in 

DO 



GREEK GENIUS 

prose and in verse, and belong to the aes- 
thetic fraternity. They, Hke the Teutons, 
are attached to institutions of learning, 
namely, to Oxford and Cambridge. They 
resemble the Germans, however, in but a 
single trait,— the conviction that they under- 
stand Greece. 

The thesis of the British belle-lettrists, to 
which they devote their energies, might be 
stated thus: British culture includes Greek 
culture. They are very modern, very Eng- 
lish, very sentimental, these British scholars. 
While the German doctors use Greek as 
a stalking-horse for Teutonic psychology, 
these English gentlemen use it as a dress- 
maker's model upon which they exhibit 
home-made English lyrics and British stock 
morality. The lesson which Browning sees 
in Alcestis is the same that he gave us in 
James Lee's Wife. Browning's appeal is 
always the appeal to robust feeling as the 
salvation of the world. Gilbert Murray, on 
the other hand, sheds a sad, clinging, Tenny- 
sonian morality over Dionysus. Jowett is 
happy to announce that Plato is theologically 
sound, and gives him a ticket-of -leave to 
walk anywhere in England. Swinburne 
clings to that belief in sentiment which 
marks the Victorian era, but Swinburne 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

finds the key to life in unrestraint instead of 
in restraint. 

There is a whole school of limp Grecism 
in England, which has grown up out of 
Keats* Grecian urn, and which is now but- 
ti'essed with philosophy and adorned with 
scholarship ; and no doubt it does bear some 
sort of relation to Greece and to Greek life. 
But this Anglican Grecism has the quality 
which all modern British art exhibits,— the 
very quality which the Greeks could not 
abide, — it is tinged with excess. The 
Briton likes strong flavours. He likes them 
in his tea, in his port wine, in his concert-hall 
songs, in his pictures of home and farm life. 
He likes something unmistakable, something 
with a smack that lets you know that the 
thing has arrived. In his literature he is the 
same. Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson lay it on 
thick with sentiment. Keats drips with 
aromatic poetry, which has a wonder and a 
beauty of its own— and whose striking qual- 
ity is excess. The scented, wholesale sweet- 
ness of the modern aesthetic school in Eng- 
land goes home to its admirers because it is 
easy art. Once enjoy a bit of it and you 
never forget it. It is always the same, the 
"old reliable," the Oxford brand, the true, 
safe, British, patriotic, moral, noble school 

Da] 



GREEK GENIUS 

of verse; which exhibits the manners and 
feeHngs of a gentleman, and has success 
written in every trait of its physiognomy. 

How this school of poetry invaded Greece 
is part of the history of British expansion in 
the nineteenth century. In the Victorian era 
the Englishman brought cricket and morn- 
ing prayers into South Africa. Robert 
Browning established himself and his carpet- 
bag in comfortable lodgings on the Acropo- 
lis,— which he spells with a ^ to show his 
intimate acquaintance with recent research. 
It must be confessed that Robert Browning's 
view of Greece never pleased, even in Eng- 
land. It was too obviously R. B. over again. 
It was Pippa and Bishop Bloiigram with a 
few pomegranate seeds and unexpected or- 
thographies thrown in. The Encyclopcedia 
Britannica is against it, and suggests, wittily 
enough, that one can hardly agree with 
Browning that Heracles got drunk for the 
purpose of keeping up other people's spirits. 

So also Edward Fitzgerald was never 
taken seriously by the English ; but this was 
for another reason. His translations are the 
best transcriptions from the Greek ever done 
by this British school ; but Fitzgerald never 
took himself seriously. I believe that if he 
had only been ambitious, and had belonged 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

to the academic classes, — like Jowett for in- 
stance,— he could have got Oxford behind 
him, and we should all have been obliged to 
regard him as a great apostle of Hellenism. 
But he was a poor-spirited sort of man, and 
never worked up his lead. 

Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, be- 
gan the serious profession of being a 
Grecian. He took it up when there was 
nothing in it, and he developed a little sect 
of his own, out of which later came Swin- 
burne and Gilbert Murray, each of whom is 
the true British article. While Swinburne 
is by far the greater poet, Murray is by far 
the more important of the two from the 
ethnological point of view. Murray was the 
first man to talk boldly about God, and to 
introduce his name into all Greek myths, 
using it as a fair translation of any Greek 
thought. There is a danger in this bold- 
ness. The reader's attention becomes hyp- 
notised with wondering in what manner 
God is to be introduced into the next verse. 
The reader becomes so concerned about Mr. 
Murray's religious obsessions that he forgets 
the Greek altogether and remembers only 
Shakespeare's hostess in her distress over 
the dying Falstaff : "Now I, to comfort him, 
bid him 'a should not think of God, — I hoped 

ni53 



GREEK GENIUS 

there was no need to trouble himself with 
any such thoughts yet." 

Murray and Arnold are twins in ethical 
endeavour. I think that it was Arnold who 
first told the British that Greece was noted 
for melancholy and for longings. He told 
them that chastity, temperance, nudity, and 
a wealth of moral rhetoric marked the 
young man of the Periclean period. Even 
good old Dean Plumptre has put this young 
man into his prefaces. Swinburne added 
the hymeneal note,— the poetic nature-view, 
—of which the following may serve as an 
example : — 

"And the trees in their season brought 
forth and were kindled anew 

By the warmth of the mixture of mar- 
riage, the child-bearing dew." 

There is hardly a page in Swinburne's Hel- 
lenising verse that does not blossom with 
Hymen. The passages would be well suited 
for use in the public schools of to-day where 
sex-knowledge in its poetic aspects is begin- 
ning to be judiciously introduced. 

This contribution of Swinburne's,— the 
hymeneal touch,— and Murray's discovery 
that the word God could be introduced 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

with effect anywhere, went like wildfire over 
England. They are characteristic of the 
latest phase of Anglo-Grecism. 

Gilbert Murray has, in late years, had the 
field to himself. He stands as the head and 
front of Greek culture in England. It ia he, 
more than any one else, who is the figure- 
head of dramatic poetry in England to-day; 
and, as such, his influence must be met, and, 
as it were, passed through, by the American 
student who is studying the Greek classics. 
It is then no accident that a chapter at the 
end of this essay is devoted to Gilbert Mur- 
ray. In studying the vagaries of the Anglo- 
Grecian school, it is necessary to take Greek 
itself as a central objective, and then super- 
pose the Anglican transcriptions on top of 
the original. 



1^71 



Ill 

THE ALCESTIS 

IN this and the following chapter two 
plays of Euripides, the Alcestis and the 
Bacchantes, are examined as dispassionately 
as may be for the purpose of gaining some 
insight into the Greek mind. The Alcestis 
is plain sailing, and no one will quarrel very 
seriously as to its nature. The Bacchantes, 
on the other hand, is the most tousled bit 
of all Greek literature. It is the happy 
hunting-ground of all religious interpreta- 
tions, and no two scholars agree with cer- 
tainty about its meaning. Ancient religion 
is of all subjects in the world the most diffi- 
cult. Every religion, even at the time it was 
in progress, was always completely misun- 
derstood, and the misconceptions have in- 
creased with the ages. They multiply with 
every monument that is unearthed. If the 
Eleusinian mysteries were going at full 
blast to-day, so that we could attend them, 
as we do the play at Oberammergau, their 
interpretation would still present difficulties. 

D93 



GREEK GENIUS 

Mommsen and Rhode would disagree. And 
ten thousand years from now, when nothing 
survives except a Hne out of St. John's Gos- 
pel and a tablet stating that Meyer played 
the part of Christ for three successive 
decades, many authoritative books will be 
written about Oberammergau, and reputa- 
tions will be made over it. Anything which 
we approach as religion becomes a nightmare 
of suggestion, and hales us hither and 
thither with thoughts beyond the reaches of 
the soul. 

The Alcestis and the Bacchantes are, in 
this paper, approached with the idea that 
they are plays. This seems not to have been 
done often enough with Greek plays. They 
are regarded as examples of the sublime, as 
forms of philosophic thought, as moral es- 
says, as poems, even as illustrations of dra- 
matic law, and they are unquestionably all of 
these things. But they were primarily plays, 
—intended to pass the time and exhilarate 
the emotions. They came into being as 
plays, and their form and make-up can best 
be understood by a study of the dramatic 
business in them. They became poems and 
philosophy incidentally, and afterwards : 
they were born as plays. A playwright is 
always an entertainer, and unless his desire 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

to hold his audience overpoweringly predom- 
inates he will never be a success. It is prob- 
able that even with ^schylus— who stands 
hors ligne as the only playwright in history 
who was really in earnest about morality— 
we should have to confess that his passion 
as a dramatic artist came first. He held his 
audiences by strokes of tremendous dramatic 
novelty. Both the stage traditions and the 
plays themselves bear this out. The fact is 
that it is not easy to keep people sitting in a 
theatre; and unless the idea of holding their 
attention predominates with the author, they 
will walk out, and he will not be able to 
deliver the rest of his story. 

In the grosser forms of dramatic amuse- 
ment—for example, where a bicycle acrobat 
is followed by a comic song — we are notcom- 
pelled to find any philosophic depth of idea 
in the sequence. But in dealing with works 
of great and refined dramatic genius like the 
Tempest, or the Bacchantes, where the emo- 
tions played upon are subtly interwoven, 
there will always be found certain minds 
which remain unsatisfied with the work of 
art itself, but must have it explained. Even 
Beethoven's sonatas have been supplied 
with philosophic addenda,— statements of 
their meaning. We know how much Shake- 



GREEK GENIUS 

speare's intentions used to puzzle the Ger- 
mans. Men feel that somewhere at the 
back of their own consciousness there is a 
philosophy or a religion with which the arts 
have some relation. In so far as these af- 
finities are touched upon in a manner that 
leaves them mysteries, we have good criti- 
cism; but when people dogmatise about 
them, we have bad criticism. In the mean- 
time the great artist goes his way. His own 
problems are enough for him. 

The early critics were puzzled to classify 
the Alcestis, and no wonder, for it contains 
many varieties of dramatic writing. For 
this very reason it is a good play to take as 
a sample of Greek spirit and Greek work- 
manship. It is a little Greek cosmos, and it 
happens to depict a side of Greek thought 
which is sympathetic to modern sentiment, 
so that we seem to be at home in its atmo- 
sphere. The Alcestis is thought to be in a 
class by itself. And yet, under close exami- 
nation, every Greek play falls into a class by 
itself (there are only about forty-five of them 
in all), and the maker of each was more con- 
cerned with the dramatic experiment upon 
which he found himself launched than he 
was with any formal classification which 
posterity might assign to his play. 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

In the Alcestis Euripides made one of the 
best plays in the world, full of true pathos, 
full of jovial humour, both of which some- 
times verge upon the burlesque. The happy 
ending is understood from the start, and 
none of the grief is painful. Alcestis herself 
is the goodwife of Greek household myth, 
who is ready to die for her husband. To 
this play the bourgeois takes his half -grown 
family. He rejoices when he hears that it is 
to be given. The absurdities of the fairy- 
tale are accepted simply. Heracles has his 
club. Death his sword, Apollo his lyre. The 
women wail, Admetus whines ; there is buf- 
foonery, there are tears, there is wit, there is 
conventional wrangling, and that word-chop- 
ping so dear to the Mediterranean theatre, 
which exists in all classic drama and survives 
in the Punch and Judy show of to-day. And 
there is the charming return of Heracles 
with the veiled lady whom he presents to 
Admetus as a slave for safe-keeping, whom 
Admetus refuses to receive for conventional 
reasons, but whom every child in the au- 
dience feels to be the real Alcestis, even 
before Heracles unveils her and gives her 
back into her husband's bosom with speeches 
on both sides that are like the closing music 
of a dream. 

1:233 



GREEK GENIUS 

The audience disperses at the close, feel- 
ing that it has spent a happy hour. No 
sonata of Mozart is more completely beauti- 
ful than the Alcestis. No comedy of Shake- 
speare approaches it in perfection. The 
merit of the piece lies not in any special idea 
it conveys, but entirely in the manner in 
which everything is carried out. 

At the risk of fatiguing the reader I must 
give a rapid summary of the Alcestis, so as 
to show some aspects of the play from a 
purely dramatic point of view, as well as to 
consider what the Greek theatre at large was 
like. 

At the opening of the play Apollo appears 
upon the steps of the palace of Admetus and 
explains that he is Apollo and that the palace 
is the palace. It appears that out of regard 
for Admetus, in whose house he had for- 
merly lived, Apollo has agreed with Death 
to lengthen Admetus' life if a substitute can 
be found. The fatal day has arrived, but no 
one is willing to die in place of Admetus, ex- 
cept his wife, Alcestis, who now lies, in arti- 
culo mortis, within the palace. Apollo is 
about to leave, so as to escape the presence 
of anything so defiling as a dead body, when 
Death stalks upon the scene, and the two 
have a most senseless bout of word- whack- 

1:243 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

ing and mutual defiance, somewhat in the 
style of Herod and Pilate in an old market- 
place comedy. During this bout the very 
simple situation of the plot becomes defi- 
nitely fixed in the mind of the top gallery. 
These two figures, Death and Apollo, stand 
like hug«, crude images at the portal of the 
play. They are grotesque, and are intended 
to be so. One must remember that every- 
thing in the Greek theatre had to be larger 
than life as well as symbolic in character. 
Inasmuch as the physical scale of the setting 
is enlarged, the ideas themselves must be 
simplified and exaggerated. The masked 
characters on the Greek stage must always 
be thought of as great marionettes, rather 
than as men. Their language will always be 
wrong, and often becomes intolerable if 
imagined as coming from the mouths of 
actors in a small theatre. In a great Greek 
theatre the costume and dialogue formed a 
sort of sign-language of conventional exag- 
geration. Realism is never in question : the 
fact that the whole affair is a fiction is al- 
ways held in mind by the Greek. The Greek 
does not do this on purpose ; he cannot help 
doing it. The whole play is to him merely 
the image of an idea cast upon the screen of 
the imagination. So then, Death and Apollo 



GREEK GENIUS 

strike at each other with verbal truncheons, 
till Apollo, becoming exasperated, prophesies 
that he is going to triumph in the end, be- 
cause Heracles is to appear and save the 
situation. Thus ends the prologue. Death 
goes into the palace to execute his office upon 
Alcestis; Apollo departs in another direc- 
tion. 

The chorus of women wallers now begin 
to creep in, in a furtive, distributive manner, 
and to ask questions of each other as to 
whether Alcestis is really dead yet. "Ah, 
what a woman ! No one ever was like her ! 
. . . How can we save her now ? . . . Not 
even a voyage to Libya will recover her 
now! . . . Ah me, ah me! . . . But is she 
really laid out yet ? I don't see the signs of 
mourning on the house. . . . O Admetus, 
you don't know yet how great your loss is !" 
etc., etc. This chorus gives a pianissimo 
introduction to that wholesale blubbering 
and wailing, the luxurious smiting and rend- 
ing and sobbing of conventional grief, which 
will, a little later, roll from the orchestra 
across the delighted and gloating audience. 
A Greek play is an opera and its effects are 
operatic. The iterations of idea, which the 
great size of the theatre made necessary, 
were accomplished through the questionings 

1:263 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

and comments of the Chorus, which acted as 
a sounding-board. The Chorus retards the 
action and keeps magnifying the reverbera- 
tions of thought and sending them to every 
part of the auditorium. 

The grieving women are now confronted 
by a maid-servant, who enters from the cen- 
tral doors and describes the last moments of 
Alcestis. No picture was ever framed with 
more art than this of Alcestis. It is gigantic 
in scale, but the exaggerations are so man- 
aged that five thousand people can enjoy it 
as well as if it were a miniature held in 
their hands. The servant describes the last 
hours of her mistress: "When she per- 
ceived that the destined day was come, she 
washed her fair skin with water from the 
river; and having taken from her closet of 
cedar vesture and ornaments, she attired 
herself becomingly; and standing before the 
altar, she prayed: *0 mistress, since I go 
beneath the earth, adoring thee for the last 
time, I will beseech thee to protect my or- 
phan children, and to the one join a loving 
wife, and to the other, a noble husband : nor, 
as their mother perishes, let my children un- 
timely die, but happy in their paternal coun- 
try let them complete a joyful life.' And 
then to all the altars which are in the house 
1^71 



GREEK GENIUS 

of Admetus she went, and crowned them, 
and prayed, tearing the leaves from off the 
myrtle boughs, tearless, without a groan ; nor 
did the approaching evil change the natural 
beauty of her skin. And then rushing to her 
chamber and her bed, there indeed she wept 
and spoke thus: *0 bridal bed, whereon I 
loosed my virgin zone with this man, for 
whom I die, farewell ! For I hate thee not ; 
but me alone hast thou lost ; for dreading to 
betray thee and my husband, I die ; but thee 
some other woman will possess, more chaste 
there cannot be, but perchance more fortu- 
nate/ And falling on it she kissed it; and 
all the bed was bathed with the flood that 
issued from her eyes. . . . And her chil- 
dren, hanging on the garments of their 
mother, wept; but she, taking them in her 
arms, embraced them, first one, and then the 
other, as about to die. And all the domestics 
wept throughout the house, bewailing their 
mistress, but she stretched out her right 
hand to each, and there was none so mean 
but she addressed him, and was answered in 
return. Such are the woes of the house of 
Admetus. And had he died indeed, he 
would have perished; but now that he has 
escaped death, he has grief to that degree 
which he will never forget." 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

The picture is exquisite and impersonal. 
The pose, supplied by the legend, has been 
studied with care. Each fold in the robe 
is significant. The character is a mere re- 
sultant from the accurate following of the 
fable. Here we have the touch of ''Eu- 
ripides the Human, with his droppings of 
warm tears," as Mrs. Browning called him. 
Yet nothing could be further from the truth 
than to imagine that Euripides himself wept 
while penning this scene or any other. Mrs. 
Browning's line leaves us a little too much in 
doubt as to just who is doing the weeping. 
The Greek artist does not weep, and Eu- 
ripides the least of all men. Precisely the 
same method is pursued by him in depicting 
Admetus. This equivocal character is pro- 
vided by the plot. Admetus must exact his 
wife's sacrifice, and yet moan mightily. His 
situation is ridiculous, and yet it is insisted 
upon with stoical rigour by Euripides, who 
saws the character out of the board, and 
sticks it up in all its crudity and self-contra- 
diction; and lo, instead of becoming a 
blemish, it becomes a foil and adds lustre to 
the play. 

"Admetus," continues the maid-servant, 
"is at this moment holding his dying wife in 
his arms, and is beseeching her not to betray 



GREEK GENIUS 

him, not to forsake him, — impracticable re- 
quests." Again the Chorus in antiphonal 
crescendo lash themselves to a climax of 
professional woe, such as all ancient peoples 
indulged in, and such as may be heard in any 
Hebrew cemetery at the present day. Curi- 
ously enough, the Greek phrases here give 
forth an Hebraic clang. '*Cry aloud, wail, 
O land of Pherae ! Never, never will I say 
that marriage brings more joy than grief," 
etc. 

The opera now begins in earnest. Alcestis 
enters, assisted by Admetus. Two children, 
a boy and a girl, cling to her skirts. A duet 
ensues,— an actual duet with musical ac- 
companiment. Both Alcestis and Admetus 
burst into song at the very top of passionate 
utterance : 

''Alcestis. O sun-god, lamp of day ! O scud- 
ding clouds that dance along the sky ! 

Admetus. He sees thee and me also,— two 
sufferers who have done nothing worthy 
of death. 

Alcestis. O Earth ! O sheltering roof ! and 
ye chambers of my maidenhood," etc. 

She sees the skiff of Charon; she feels the 
hand of death clutching her. Her limbs are 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

giving way, the halls of Hades loom over 
her: she calls wildly to her children. Ad- 
metus continues to put in his "me too" in the 
proper tenor voice. The scene is like the 
end of the first act of grand opera. Both 
characters are at the footlights, singing their 
uttermost. The tenor is clutching the lady's 
wrist and she is straining towards the stars. 

But a Greek play was never divided into 
acts, and so, when the spasm is over, Alces- 
tis collects herself for her great testamentary 
speech. Here is another masterpiece of the 
pathetic, which rehearses the entire situation. 
Alcestis begs Admetus not to marry again, 
for fear lest a stepmother should maltreat 
the children. Admetus consents, and pro- 
ceeds to lift a long-drawn tragic wail, 
precisely as if he were a moral hero. He 
will wear mourning, not for a year, but all 
his life; he will forego music and company. 
He will have an image made by cunning 
artists, and place it in his bed, and upon this 
he will cast himself in paroxysms of unavail- 
ing grief. 

Admetus' character is that of a wooden 
nut-cracker; and we feel a note of irony, a 
note almost of humour, when these exalted 
sentiments flow from him. It is true that 
any diminution of the size of the theatre 

1:30 



GREEK GENIUS 

would tinge Admetus' speeches here with 
burlesque. But as they stand they are not 
burlesque. The exaggeration is precisely in 
keeping with the exaggeration of Alcestis 
herself. The merit of the whole lies in the 
subtlety with which the scale of values is 
adhered to. These edges and curvatures, 
taken together, are what cast the image on 
the air. Euripides is merely setting the le- 
gend upon the stage in an effective w^ay, so 
that a child or a peasant can enjoy it. 

When Admetus has made an end of his 
threnody, there follows a final duet in prose, 
—at the end of which Alcestis dies. The 
boy then flings himself upon his mother's 
body, music sounds and the voice of a hidden 
singer behind the scenes gives the lyric: 
''Hear me, hear me, mother, I implore thee !" 
Alcestis' body is borne into the palace, fol- 
lowed by Admetus and the children ; and the 
Chorus raises a quiet, conventional, soothing 
and very beautiful hymn: "Daughter of 
Pelias, be thine a happy life in the sunless 
home of Hades' halls ! Of thee the Muses' 
votaries shall sing on the seven-stringed 
mountain shell in hymns without a harp." 
Nothing could be more satisfying than the 
simple subsidence of this whole sad episode : 
the closing of the palace doors, the peaceful 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

music; and thereupon— what next follows 
—the unexpected, sudden appearance of 
Heracles, ignorant, boorish, and good- 
hearted,— radiant Heracles, the demigod 
and friend to man. He falls into chat with 
the Chorus about a mission which he has 
undertaken into Thessaly, and about the 
dangers of his life in a general way. Here 
we have a plunge from tragedy into joyful 
comedy of a Shakespearian kind,— a transi- 
tion very unusual in Greek plays. Greek 
drama is full of variety, and the tints of its 
clouds change at every moment; but the 
gradations are generally slight. These ex- 
tremes in the Alcestis were, no doubt, what 
puzzled the critics to classify the play. A 
talk now ensues between Heracles and the 
Chorus, which resembles a conversation be- 
tween a schoolboy and the coachman. It 
touches on hard adventures, fire-breathing 
steeds, heroic strife. Then re-enter Ad- 
metus, this time as the host who has heard 
that his old friend is at the door. The scene 
is buskined, of course ; but the substance of 
it is the meeting of hearty comrades, club 
men, no longer young : 

"My dear fellow! how are you? Quite 
well, I trust?" 

"I should hope so ! And you, old man ?" 

D33 



GREEK GENIUS 

"You stay, of course?" 

"So it seems." 

"Bravo! Your room is ready." 

"But how about all this mourning? Not 
one of the family, I hope?" 

"Yes, no,— a relative, yet no relation. 
I '11 tell you." 

"It is impossible, you know, for me to 
come in and be entertained by you while the 
mourning is going on." 

"Your room is on the other side of the 
house. A woman, my dear boy,— a sort of 
dependent. {To the servants.) Here, some 
of you fellows, show Heracles his room and 
be quick about it !" 

This burly Admetus, it must be observed, 
has no relation to the whining Admetus of 
the first act. No attempt is made to connect 
them. There is no such thing in a Greek 
play as what we to-day should call character- 
drawing. The artist is always merely dress- 
ing a stock character, or giving his own 
version of a well-known tale. The problem 
is to illustrate the legend; the characters 
must look after themselves; they come out 
right if the legend is right. If the legend, 
as in this case, cracks up a character into 
separate personalities, nobody objects; it is 
all the more entertaining. After all, the 

1:34] 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

progress of almost every good plot, whether 
ancient or modern, depends upon the fact 
that somebody acts in a very unlikely way. 
The modern writer wastes his talents in toil- 
ing at this weak place. The ancient accepts 
it cheerfully. This is one of the blessings of 
having legend as a foundation for fiction. 
The absurdities are the very points that no 
one will question. 

Admetus enters the palace, and the Chorus 
sings a lyric in praise of the hospitality of 
his house, ''where Pythian Apollo, the sweet 
harper, once deigned to make his home, while 
spotted lynxes couched amid the sheep in joy 
to hear his melodies, — since which time 
riches and blessings are poured upon one 
who welcomes the guest, though his eyes are 
wet with tears ; and at my heart sits the be- 
lief that heaven's servant will be blessed." 

There next ensues a most amusing and 
original scene which Euripides throws in as 
a make-weight on the comic side. The 
corpse of Alcestis is borne forth upon a bier; 
Admetus comes with it ; a train is formed to 
accompany the corpse to the pyre. The 
small procession is, however, confronted by 
another small procession which appears from 
the wings : Pheres, the father of Admetus, 
has come with his conventional condolences 



GREEK GENIUS 

and ritual gifts for the dead, the gifts being 
borne by servants. We had forgotten 
Pheres, though, from time to time, someone 
on the stage had spoken ill of him because 
of his refusal to die for his son. Pheres 
himself is entirely unconscious of the odium 
in which he stands, and he makes a proper 
speech. He is met by a torrent of abuse 
from Admetus. The Chorus protests against 
the indecency of this public quarrel; but 
Pheres though old is not feeble, and defends 
himself with scorching power. Again the 
Chorus is shocked; and a line-for-line, 
hammer-and-tongs Billingsgate follows, of 
the sort dear to the Athenian audience. The 
protagonists finally separate, leaving shafts 
in the air: each has his cortege behind him 
as he hurls back insults : '*Go bury thy vic- 
tim with the hand that murdered her !'* 'T 
disown thy paternal hearth, and if need be, I 
will proclaim it by heralds !'* 

This scene is intolerable if taken seriously; 
but is delightful if we bear in mind while 
reading it the so-called ''New Comedy" of 
the Greeks, which survives only in the form 
of the Roman imitations. This New Com- 
edy was a comedy of manners, and came to 
blossom a couple of generations later than 
Aristophanes. On its stage fathers and 

D63 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

sons, masters and servants, live in a hurly- 
burly of rapid-fire talk. The modem Italian 
name for this sort of scene is botta e ris- 
posta. The roots of the New Comedy un- 
doubtedly extended back into classic drama, 
and it is thus quite natural that Euripides 
should have written a scene that must be 
read by the light of Plautus. 

The next scene is frankly comic, and in 
the very greatest manner. The arrival of 
Heracles at the house of mourning, and his 
innocent, gluttonous feasting while the dead 
body lies in the next room, is one of the most 
vigorous ideas in Greek mythology, and is 
exactly fitted for the stage. First comes a 
servant's description of Heracles' revelry 
and wassailing, and next enter Heracles him- 
self, in his cups, and crowned with myrtle. 
He gives the speech which might be called 
"Heracles' advice to servants" : 

"Ho, you there! What scowling, what 
pomposity ! Is that the way to treat a guest ? 
Why don't you be polite? But what does 
one like you know about life? Come here; 
listen to me. All must die, and no man 
knows if he shall see the morrow's dawn. 
Fate walks darkling, and cannot be caught 
with all your cleverness. Now list, learn, 
be wise by me. What of it all then, I say? 

n373 



GREEK GENIUS 

What of it all? Why, drink and bless thy- 
self with the day. Dismiss all else into the 
realm of chance. Second, avoid chastity; 
for Venus is a goddess. As for the rest, 
trust one that knows : for I am right about 
this ! What, man ! Dismiss thy bad temper ; 
crown thy brows, and smooth them out, too. 
The splash of the wine will cure thee ! Leave 
the dead for dead, and get wisdom ; for the 
knotted forehead of piety never knew a life 
that was life at all, but only pure misery." 

Heracles' attack on the servant naturally 
leads to an explanation of the cause of 
mourning in the house, and to the imme- 
diate sobering up of Heracles himself. His 
soliloquy follows, — the solemn address in 
which he declares his intention of lying in 
wait for Death at the tomb of Alcestis, of 
overcoming the monster with his mighty 
hands, and of restoring the woman to the 
noble host who had concealed his sorrow 
rather than drive the guest from the door. 
Heracles goes off to watch by the tomb, and 
immediately enter Admetus. 

We are now prepared to enjoy a little 
more wailing and lyrical business. The re- 
turn to the empty house is celebrated in 
antiphony between the Chorus and Admetus. 
They begin piano: 

128-] 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

''Home again! Alas, what have you not 
suffered ! Ah me, a noble wife buried !" 

"Ah, you touch the wound! How can I 
bear to see my own roof -tree! I envy the 
dead. I envy the childless !" 

"You are not the first." 

"Why did you prevent me from leaping 
into the tomb ?" 

"It must be borne." 

"O to contrast this day with the hour 
when I entered this house,— with the mar- 
riage torch, and the shout of banqueting; 
but now, grave-clothes for wedding gar- 
ments, and woe for hymns. The empty 
couch, the chairs she sat in,— the desolation 
of it drives me out !" 

This scene gives the poet a new opportu- 
nity, and again "Euripides the Human" 
works up all possible suggestions of the 
pathetic with cunning hand. There is, per- 
haps, a touch of virtuosity in the appeal. 
One feels that one is being played upon : the 
hand is almost too cunning. Yet who can 
regret its skill? The wooden Admetus of 
the earlier part and the burly clubman Ad- 
metus of the central scene are here succeeded 
by a romantic Admetus,— a throstle-throated 
widower, who mourns his lost saint. The 
very dust on the furniture smites the wretch, 

n393 



GREEK GENIUS 

till he declares in true penitence that he 
wishes he had not made the bargain. "This 
— this is worse than death!" 

No one can deny the dramatic beauty of 
Admetus' grief in this scene. The beauty is 
just the part that gets lost in transcription. 
Here is a speech comparable to one of the 
great arias in an Italian opera. When Eu- 
ripides chooses to be sweet, there is hardly 
anything like his sweetness in all literature. 
The lines have a thrill like the appeal of a 
tenor voice. We can and ought to weep, not 
bitterly but happily, as the Italian matron 
does at the melodrama, murmuring, ''E 
hello! E hello r 

When, shortly after this, Heracles returns 
with the veiled lady, whom he says he has 
won in an open-to-all prize contest, he finds 
Admetus extremely unwilling to take her in ; 
and from this point to the end of the play, 
which is not far distant, we have one of 
those stage situations of the perfect comedy, 
—touching, gay, charming and obvious,— 
the thing the stage exists for, the only dan- 
ger being lest the lucky playwright shall drag 
it out and overdo it; which Euripides does 
not. Heracles beseeches Admetus to harbour 
the lady for a season, as a special and per- 
sonal favour. Admetus is divided between 

C403 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

his reverence for the god and his regard for 
appearances. He is, in fact, caught between 
his own two crack virtues— hospitaHty and 
professional widowhood. At last he gives 
way and the play closes quietly and quickly 
with half a dozen stock lines from the 
Chorus. 

It is clear at a glance that the Alcestis be- 
longs to an epoch of extreme sophistication. 
Everything has been thought out and pol- 
ished; every ornament is a poem. If a 
character has to give five words of explana- 
tion or of prayer, it is done in silver. The 
tone is all the tone of cultivated society, the 
appeal is an appeal to the refined, casuistical 
intelligence. The smile of Voltaire is all 
through Greek literature; and it was not 
until the age of Louis XIV, or the Regency, 
that the modern world w^as again to know a 
refinement and a sophistication which recall 
the Greek work. Now, in one word, this 
subtlety which pleases us in matters of senti- 
ment is the very thing that separates us from 
the Greek upon the profoundest questions of 
philosophy. Where religious or metaphys- 
ical truth is touched upon, either Greek 
sophistication carries us off our feet with a 
rapture which has no true relation to the 
subject, or else we are offended by it. We 

[:4a 



GREEK GENIUS 

do not understand sophistication. The 
Greek has pushed aesthetic analysis further 
than the modern can bear. We follow well 
enough through the light issues, but when 
the deeper questions are reached we lose 
our footing. At this point the modern cries 
out in applause, "Religion, philosophy, pure 
feeling, the soul!"— He cries out, ''Mystic 
cult, Asiatic influence, Nature worship, — 
deep things over there!"— Or else he cries, 
"What amazing cruelty, what cynicism!" 
And yet it is none of these things, but only 
the artistic perfection of the work which is 
moving us. We are the victims of clever 
stage management. 

The cruder intelligence is ever compelled 
to regard the man of complex mind as a 
priest or as a demon. The child, for in- 
stance, asks about the character in a story, 
"But is he a good man or a bad man, papa?" 
The child must have a moral explanation of 
anything which is beyond his aesthetic com- 
prehension. So also does the modern intel- 
ligence question the Greek. 

The matter is complicated by yet another 
element,— namely, stage convention. Our 
modern stage is so different from the classic 
stage that we are bad judges of the Greek 
playwright's intentions. The quarrels which 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

arise as to allegorical or secondary meanings 
in a work of art are generally connected 
with some unfamiliar feature of its setting. 
A great light is thrown upon any work of art 
when we show how its form came into being, 
and thus explain its primary meaning. Such 
an exposition of the primary or apparent 
meaning is often sufficient to put all sec- 
ondary meanings out of court. For in- 
stance : It is, as we know, the Germans who 
have found in Shakespeare a coherent philo- 
sophic intention. They think that he wrote 
plays for the purpose of stating metaphys- 
ical truths. The Englishman does not 
believe this, because the Englishman is fa- 
miliar with that old English stage work. He 
knows its traditions, its preoccupation with 
story-telling, its mundane character, its 
obliviousness to the sort of thing that Ger- 
many has in mind. The Englishman knows 
the conventions of his own stage, and this 
protects him from finding mares'-nests in 
Shakespeare. Again, Shakespeare's son- 
nets used to be a favourite field for mystical 
exegesis, till Sir Sidney Lee explained their 
form by reference to the sixteenth-century 
sonnet literature of the Continent. This put 
to flight many theories. 

In other words, the appeal to convention 
[433 



GREEK GENIUS 

is the first duty of the scholar. But, unfor- 
tunately, in regard to the conventions of the 
Classic Stage, the moderns are all in the 
dark. Nothing like that stage exists to-day. 
We are obliged to make guesses as to its in- 
tentions, its humour, its relation to philos- 
ophy. If the classics had only possessed a 
cabinet-sized drama, like our own, we might 
have been at home there. But this giant 
talk, this megaphone-and-buskin method, 
offers us a problem in dynamics which stag- 
gers the imagination. All we can do is to 
tread lightly and guess without dogmatising. 
The typical Athenian, Euripides, was so 
much deeper-dyed in scepticism than any 
one since that day, that really no one has 
ever lived who could cross-question him, — 
let alone expound the meanings of his plays. 
In reading Euripides, we find ourselves ready 
to classify him at moments as a satirist, 
and at other moments as a man of feeling. 
Of course he was both. Sometimes he seems 
like a religious man, and again, like a char- 
latan. Of course he was neither. He was 
a playwright. 



1144: 



IV 

THE BACCHANTES 

THE coherence of any scheme of 
thought, even though it be co- 
herence of thought shown in the operation 
of a loom for weaving carpets, excites in 
us a glow of admiration. We give to it 
almost a sentimental response of feeling. 
Thus the subtle Greek fire which lies hidden 
beneath the technical development of tragic 
themes upon the stage has always aroused a 
vague religiosity in modern poets, even 
w^hen the themes dealt with were revolting 
or the stage effects were unknown or unap- 
preciated by modern scholars. To Mil- 
ton, to Goethe, to Swinburne, a Greek play 
is a feast of solemn declamation and of lyri- 
cal hymning, whose merit lies in the su- 
preme beauty of its language and in the sup- 
posed moral exaltation of its ideas. Cer- 
tainly the original Greek is characterised by 
great beauty of language; but a play is 
something more than a feast of song. A 
play is an exciting, varied, and deeply mov- 

[:45] 



GREEK GENIUS 

ing exhibition, where every word sparkles 
with action, and every action with wit. Dec- 
lamation and beauty are mere servants to 
the plot and progress of the drama. In seek- 
ing to understand Greek plays we must for- 
get Milton and think rather of Moliere. We 
must do all that we can to recover the vital- 
ity and the element of entertainment which 
the original possessed. In this way alone 
can we arrive at a guess as to what the work 
meant to its first audiences. 

I have, on an earlier page, likened a Greek 
tragedy to an opera, because the opera is its 
nearest living congener, and is a thing na- 
tive and familiar to us all. Strictly speaking, 
a Greek play was a musical drama; that is 
to say, the spoken word, unaccompanied by 
music, was the foundation and road-bed of 
the drama: music was kept for the adorn- 
ment of exciting passages, and for climaxes. 
Such a division of territory between speech 
and song is the most effective that can be 
imagined on the stage; and it was an infi- 
nite loss to modern drama when the musi- 
cians began to overrun the whole of the 
libretto. The solemnity, the dead serious- 
ness of spoken words, — to which the story 
was constantly returning, and from which 
it again leaped into music as from a spring- 

1:463 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

board,— lent a sternness and a variety to 
Greek drama, which opera can never achieve 
until it shall adopt the Greek system as to 
the use of music. Half the power of the 
lyric is thrown away by making the whole 
text lyrical. We see in this disposition of 
the libretto by the Greeks an example of that 
mastery which is in all their artistic work. 
A Greek work of art is aesthetically cor- 
rect : it is always right. 

Let us now examine the Bacchantes, 
which is very unlike the Alcestis in exter- 
nals; and yet very like it in metaphysical 
make-up and in stage technique. The in- 
dulgent reader will remember that it is im- 
possible to give an account of a play with- 
out making that very sort of philosophic 
abstract which must always be false. A 
play is its own meaning, and no transcript 
will convey it. Any analysis must be re- 
garded as a mere finger-post directing the 
reader towards the text. 

The Bacchantes is as remarkable as any- 
thing in Hellenic art. The daring of it, the 
brilliancy of it, the outrageousness of it, the 
mockery it suggests and the gaiety with 
which it proceeds, its beauty and intellect,— 
are all subordinated to the success of the 
[471 



GREEK GENIUS 

whole as a dramatic show. No wonder that 
Euripides did not pubHsh the Bacchantes 
during his Hfetime. The natural power in 
it was enough to hang any man; and Eu- 
ripides was already a suspect. He had been 
banished from Athens for some reason that 
is not known, but which was perhaps con- 
nected with his treatment of religious topics 
on the stage. We often commit witticisms 
to the air, and then hold our breath and 
hope for the best ; and if the Bacchantes had 
happened to come out at the moment of an 
Athenian military defeat, the audacities of it 
might have led to a tragedy in real life. 

The Bacchantes is supposed by modern 
scholars to be a mystical allegory. Both the 
Germans and the Britons agree upon this. 
There is, as Mr. Tyrrell says, ''an ethical 
contentment and speculative calm in the 
play." I quote from the preface of Mr. 
I. T. Beckwith's edition where Bernhardy 
(Griech. Ltg.) is cited. Mr. Beckwith thus 
describes the Bacchantes: "A play in which 
faith celebrates its rites and unbelief is put 
to shame, must, by reason of the seriousness 
of its import and the lofty religious inspira- 
tion pervading the whole and manifesting 
itself in many brilliant and profound utter- 
ances, have attained great fame in antiquity. 

1:483 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

It was much read, as the frequent citations 
and reminiscences in the Greek and Roman 
writers show, and was often cited." . . . 
**The choral odes follow the progress of the 
action more closely perhaps than in any other 
play of Euripides, expressing the emotions 
that accompany a devout faith as it passes 
from the most buoyant hopefulness, through 
a gradually darkening struggle, out again 
into a complete triumph." 

Before leaving the serious part of the sub- 
ject I cannot forbear to quote a few words 
of Teutonic learning which illustrate the 
great Nature-Myth Discovery of the nine- 
teenth century. This particular suggestion is 
cited with respect and without a smile by 
British and American scholars. The theory 
concerns the birth of Dionysus. As is well 
known, Semele, the mother of Dionysus, 
being with child by Zeus, desired to see the 
god, but was unable to bear the divine pres- 
ence, and so died; or, as others assert, she 
was killed by a thunderbolt launched by 
Hera. The child, being thus prematurely 
born, was taken by Zeus and carried about 
in his own thigh, held in by gold pins. He 
was afterwards secreted in Asia Minor at 
Mount Tmolus near Sardis. The following 
is a foot-note in Mr. Beckwith^s edition : 

1:49:1 



GREEK GENIUS 

"Nysa, to whose nymphs the infant 
Dionysos was sent, is located by Homer in 
Thrace. But in later times mention is made 
of a Nysa in Thessaly, Euboea, BcEotia, 
. . . Arabia, India, and other places." In 
this uncertainty as to location, Wecklein 
finds an indication of the origin of the Di- 
onysiac myth, which he explains as follows : 
"Nysa, like Aia, the land of the golden 
fleece, was originally thought of as in the 
heavens, and was afterwards transferred to 
earth. The rain-cloud, big with tempest, is 
the mother of Dionysos; the cloud-gather- 
ing god of the storms is his father. When, 
after a flash and heavy peal of thunder, the 
cloud bursts in a short and, as it were, pre- 
mature shower, a simple imagination con- 
ceived of this as an untimely birth of the 
rain from the cloud. This naive representa- 
tion led to the personification of the cloud 
as Semele and the rain as Dionysos." 

We may observe in this note the heavy 
German psychologist placing his ponderous, 
elephantine hypothesis carefully upon the 
incalculable sallies of Greek fancy; and let 
us observe next, the solemnity of the Angli- 
can "Amen." Mr. Cruickshank finds that 
"the analogy is, at any rate, obvious and 
striking." 

1:50:] 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

So far as the thought goes, one can imag- 
ine Plato's introducing this very explana- 
tion of the premature birth of Dionysus into 
one of his dialogues. But Plato would have 
used it as the closing snapper of a scene, 
when the company were fatigued, or the 
subject was about to change. He would 
have allowed Socrates to suggest the idea 
demurely, just before some interruption, so 
as to raise a laugh and, at the same time, to 
escape responsibility. Socrates would, no 
doubt, protest that he had the story from a 
third party, and merely desired to know 
whether the company thought it important. 
The whole matter would thus have been left 
in the realm of imaginative humour, where 
it belongs. But the German has laid down the 
law of the myth as if it were a sausage ; and 
the Englishman has swallowed the sausage 
and pronounced it good. Such were the 
Greeks ; and such are the moderns. 

Let us now examine the text of the Bac- 
chantes, not learnedly, but casually. Ac- 
cording to the legend, the Bacchantes who 
tore Pentheus to pieces were the followers 
of Dionysus, and were punishing Pentheus 
for his refusal to worship the new god. 
Pentheus and Dionysus were first-cousins, 
being grandsons of Cadmus by his two 



GREEK GENIUS 

daughters, Agave and Semele. Cadmus was, 
of course, among the most respectable pa- 
triarchs of Greece, one of the Argonauts; 
and, at the time the story begins, he had 
resigned the government of Thebes, turning 
it over to his grandson Pentheus. 

At the opening of the play Dionysus en- 
ters as Prologue, and explains that he has 
come disguised as a mortal with the Bac- 
chantes in his train to establish his religion 
in Greece. He has been all over Asia Minor 
and now comes to Thebes, the home of his 
family and the first Greek city that he has 
entered. The smoking ruins of the palace 
where Hera's thunderbolt had fallen and 
killed his mother have now been fenced off 
as a sanctuary, and they form part of the 
palace before which the action proceeds. 
The god has come back to his birthplace in 
order to punish his mother's two sisters, 
who have never taken the story of his divine 
birth seriously, but have ridiculed his preten- 
sions from the beginning. He has come dis- 
guised as a handsome, effeminate-looking 
youth, in order to move among the people 
and excite them before his origin is sus- 
pected. It appears that, as a result of his 
charms, all the women-folk of Thebes are 
already wandering in the mountains in Bac- 

1522 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

chic frenzy. Pentheus is fighting against 
the new rehgion; but both Pentheus and 
Thebes shall soon discover that Dionysus is 
a god. 

He closes his address to the Chorus: 
"Take your drums, your native instruments 
of Phrygia, the invention of Mother Rhea 
and myself, and coming, beat them about 
this royal palace of Pentheus, that the city 
of Cadmus may see it. In the meantime I 
will to the mountains, to join the rout of 
bacchanal women." 

The whole play is thus in full swing in a 
moment; and as Dionysus makes his exit 
the Msenads begin their dance. The long 
opening chorus in which the wild women 
chant the praises of Dionysus, has in it such 
a rhythm as to bring the dancers with their 
streaming hair, their fawn-skins, their great 
tambourines, their Phrygian flutes and their 
thyrsus-spears before the reader. Nothing 
is left of all the din and frenzy, nothing of 
the dancing and shouting of those inspired 
Bacchantes, except the beat of their pulses 
which has somehow been left in the blood of 
the verse. It is impossible to read the lines, 
no matter how ignorant one may be as to 
the theory of Greek metres, without hearing 
the thud of feet and seeing files of mad- 

1:533 



GREEK GENIUS 

dened women with their heads thrown back, 
dancing in time, and uttering irregular, sav- 
age ejaculations that mingle with the pipes 
and tambourines, while the steady undertone 
of the words and the incessant onward drive 
of the circling phalanxes fling spells upon 
the air. The very length of this scene en- 
gulfs the reader: and, in the acting, where 
repetitions were no doubt resorted to, the 
whole amphitheatre must have been thrown 
into a daze and cradled to blind happiness 
by the brilliant, barbaric costumes, by the 
movement and by the music. 

As the opening feature of an opera this 
chorus is a masterly and thrilling work. Be- 
fore the dance is half finished the spectator 
has forgotten everything in the world ex- 
cept the play before him. Against this back- 
ground Euripides now introduces two very 
old men, who are among the most sacred 
figures in Greek mythology,— Tiresias, the 
mythical soothsayer, a name as old as Ho- 
mer, and Cadmus, the ancestral hero and 
founder, — Cadmus, the great mythic Hel- 
lene. One might almost say that these old 
men represent Moses and Aaron. They come 
in dressed for Bacchic rites, with thyrsi in 
their hands, garlands of ivy on their heads, 
— beribboned for the fray. It appears that 

i:54n 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

they are converts to the new religion. They 
exhibit the characters of gay old bourgeois, 
delighted at their own temerity, knowing 
they will be laughed at, yet resolved to enjoy 
themselves. They are off for the mountains. 
The audience must have gripped its um- 
brellas with joy: 'This is too good to be 
true! Is it humourous? Is it serious?" One 
hardly knows. But it is certainly the best 
thing ever done on the stage ! The old dar- 
lings enter, meeting as by appointment, clap 
each other on the shoulder, admire each 
other's dresses, swear they will dance like 
good ones, — they alone of the city. "But they 
alone are wise! They will not be ashamed 
of their old age, not they! The god never 
intended to distinguish between old and 
young, but demands worship from all! 
They join hands in rapture (Tiresias being 
blind) and are about to leave, when enter 
the gloomy and boorish Pentheus. As a foil 
to the old gentlemen Pentheus is perfect. 
He is young, and he is angry. He now de- 
scribes how all the women in his kingdom, 
including his mother and his two aunts, have 
been led off to the woods by an odious, ef- 
feminate, scented youth with long locks. 
The men have joined the women. It is a 
saturnalia of drink and debauchery. Pen- 



GREEK GENIUS 

theus has already arrested some of the wo- 
men, and intends fo catch the stranger and 
put him in chains. One sees that Pentheus 
wears already the rigidity of madness in his 
eye. Although he is undoubtedly in the 
right, and is the only person on the stage 
with whom any sensible man can sympathise, 
he is made so unpleasant, and the old men 
are made so charming, that our hearts go 
against decency and order. 

When he reproaches Tiresias for joining 
the rabble and disgracing his white hair and 
his profession, Pentheus becomes so unjust 
and so rude that we are against him for 
being a lout. Tiresias, in a long, doddering 
reply to Pentheus, now praises the divinity 
of Bacchic worship, including the value of 
drunkenness, speaks lightly of women's 
chastity, expounds legends, describes scen- 
ery, and remains perfectly charming. Old 
Cadmus adds a hint that as Dionysus is one 
of the family, Pentheus ought to pretend to 
believe in him, anyway. This is one of those 
human touches that Euripides manages to 
throw into the tragic scenery in some of his 
plays as no one else has ever done or could 
do. He surprises you with a smile in the 
midst of the whirlwind. In like manner, in 
the Orestes, when Helen cuts off a lock of 

1:563 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

hair to lay upon the tomb of her aunt 
Clytemnestra, some one cries out, *'See now 
how the hussy has cut it off in such a manner 
that it will not spoil her beauty. She is the 
same woman she always was !" 

This scene of the two old men belongs 
among the greatest things in drama. It is 
beautiful ; it is ridiculous ; it is pathetic ; it is 
true to nature ; it is very nearly but not quite 
burlesque ; it is in contrast to the rest of the 
play. The old gentlemen are a little senile, 
perhaps, but they are sweet-tempered, and 
represent all that is benign and tolerant in 
old age. They now join hands again, sup- 
porting each other as they leave the stage 
and declaring that they will pray for Pen- 
theus and so strive to avert the punishments 
for his impiety. The Chorus after this de- 
parture celebrates the vita gioiosa in a hymn 
to Bacchus and Venus, and in a way so far 
beyond modern comprehension in its beauty 
and abandonment, that we are tempted to 
call it religious. But it is not religious. 
Make it a little grosser and it will be a drink- 
ing-song. But it is not a drinking-song. It 
is not gross: it is as refined as Praxiteles,— 
and as conventional. It is, in fact, a mere 
necessary, aesthetic member of the dramatic 
whole. 

1:573 



GREEK GENIUS 

We are taught throughout this play that 
anyone who resists Dionysus is an innovator, 
and thus all the tag-rags of prejudice against 
new ideas are marshalled in the choruses 
against Pentheus. The following is a sam- 
ple : *'True wisdom is to keep the heart and 
soul aloof from over-subtle wits. That 
which the less enlightened crowd approves 
and practises will I accept." There must be 
a dozen such saws scattered through the 
choruses, and the dramatic purpose of them 
is evidently to explain and justify the doom 
of Pentheus. Now inasmuch as Dionysus 
was a new god introducing a new religion, 
without a tradition to support him, all this 
appeal to tradition is ridiculous. But the 
alchemy of good stage-writing takes no ac- 
count of logic, except stage logic. The 
stage is like politics. Any reasoning that 
will patch the plot serves the purpose. And 
it is absolutely necessary that the person 
who is going to be punished by fate in a 
Greek tragedy should appear to be kicking 
against established religious feeling. Other- 
wise the old stock phrases and proverbial 
moralities in the choruses could not be used 
with effect. The Maenads had no counter- 
part in the real life of Athens and Thebes, 
and we may suppose that the Athenian au- 

CsS] 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

dience accepted all these matters imagina- 
tively, and as a part of the d ounce of the 
play. We do the same in accepting our stage 
villains and the heroes of our fiction. 

The dramatic interest in the Bacchantes, 
from the moment when Pentheus and 
Dionysus first meet, consists in watching 
Dionysus ''play" Pentheus (and later play 
Pentheus' mother, Agave) as a fisherman 
plays a trout. From one point of view it is 
the most complex and finished piece of 
cruelty in the world. From the dramatic 
point of view it is an intense, careful, logical, 
breathlessly interesting study of madness, — 
that sort of madness which the Greek drama 
loved, which was cast upon a man by the 
gods. From the point of view of those who 
garrison the modern strongholds of Learn- 
ing the play is, as we have seen, a mystical 
drama typifying the quiet life. 

To return to the story. As soon as the 
first Chorus of Maenads has finished its 
strain in praise of the vita gioiosa there fol- 
lows a picturesque scene. Dionysus is 
brought in guarded, and has a verbal bout 
with the tyrant Pentheus. Goethe saw an 
analogy between this scene and the tableau 
of Christ before Pilate; and in truth, the 
situation, it must be confessed, is tremen- 

1:593 



GREEK GENIUS 

dous; but the interview is conducted on a 
low plane. The god is in a casuistical 
mood. There is much back-talk, and double 
entendre, and an atmosphere of drawing- 
room dialectics. 

"I will cast thy body into prison !" 

*The god will release me.'' 

*Thegod? Where is he?" 

"Near me ; but thine impious eyes see him 
not." 

''Servants, seize this fellow! He insults 
me." 

"You know not why you live or what you 
do." 

"Away with him to prison !" 

If Euripides has avoided the sublime in 
his handling of this judgment scene, it must 
be noted that he could not have put on the 
tall cothurnus of ^schylus here without re- 
modelling his entire play. His Dionysus 
stands throughout the drama on a level with 
Pentheus, who is dealt with as an antagonist. 
The scene is vital, if not noble: it is first- 
rate popular drama. 

The stranger god is now led off to be in- 
carcerated. The Chorus sings a wild, ter- 
rible strain, calling upon Dionysus to save 
himself. It is not long before the power of 
the deity, who is in chains within the palace, 

C603 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

begins to make itself manifest. The palace 
rocks, flames burst forth, and Dionysus re- 
appears on the steps of the building. There 
ensues an antiphonal duet between the god 
and the Chorus, fortissimo tutti. It is tre- 
mendous : it is wonderful ! The verses of 
the libretto are short, but of a perfectly- 
amazing force. They seem to be running to 
a fire. It must be that, as in modern times, 
the effect of this scene was ensured by repeti- 
tions of the musical scheme; for the text of 
the duet as it stands is too short to have any 
carrying power. 

When quiet has been restored, Dionysus 
proceeds to give the Chorus a vivid account 
of what happened in the stable, and of how 
he frustrated the infuriated Pentheus. The 
low moral tone of Dionysus' dealings with 
Pentheus is maintained in this lyrical ac- 
count of how he tricked and exasperated his 
victim. For Pentheus, thinking to bind the 
god, enchained a bull, which he found in the 
stable. Breathing out fury and sweating 
from his body, the madman dashed about in 
the stable, while the god sat by and mocked 
him. Such mockery, by the way, was, in 
the Greek imagination, the worst thing that 
could befall a man. There is hardly a page 
of Greek tragedy which does not reveal the 

ceo 



GREEK GENIUS 

fear of being laughed at, which walks like a 
spectre in the Greek soul. Even Medea, 
whose practical sorrows and desperate situa- 
tion seem to require no such remote meta- 
physical motive, kills her children largely 
out of fear that she will be ridiculed for her 
insuccess in life. 

The recitation by Dionysus of his triumph 
in the stable is a sample of sustained decla- 
mation in trochaic tetrameters. Such pas- 
sages seem to have been a feature in Greek 
drama; and one cannot read them without 
being convinced that they were accompanied 
by some sort of conventional gesture. The 
actor perhaps moved forward and back, 
keeping time in words, gesture, and step — 
probably facing the Chorus and doing a sort 
of pas setil. Almost exactly the same kind 
of business was practised on the old Italian 
stage, and it survives in Rossini's operas. 

The trochaic tetrameter, which in our 
minds is connected with slow solemnity, 
because of its use in Longfellow's ''Tell me 
not in mournful numbers," seems to have 
been used by the Greeks in passages of 
cumulative excitement, as, for instance, in 
dialogues of discovery, where the rising 
emotions of the speakers are reflected in the 
jerky, shrill movement of the verse. This 

L622 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

metre has often been used with the same 
effect in English, as, for instance, in that 
dramatic lyric, "J^st in time for Lanigan's 
Ball." Euripides employs it here in describ- 
ing the scene in the stable, where Pentheus 
was dashing about with a drawn sword to 
slay the god. 

Pentheus now rushes on the stage, pretty 
well exhausted. ''I have suffered terrible 
things," he shouts ; *'the stranger has escaped 
me!" Dionysus greets him calmly. "Did I 
not say or did you not hear that someone 
would deliver me?" "I order ye to close 
every tower all round !" shouts Pentheus to 
the servants. But the god, who has now 
become gentle, if not kind, promises not to 
escape while they both listen to the tale of 
the First Messenger. 

Enter the First Messenger with those de- 
scriptions of the miraculous doings of the 
Bacchantes in the forest, upon which rest 
most of our modem notions about these 
mysteries. The man has actually seen the 
daughters of Cadmus leading the whole 
Bacchic rout. At first he saw them all asleep. 
Then they waked. And then "they let loose 
their hair over their shoulders ; and arranged 
their deer-skins, as many as had had the 
fastenings of their knots unloosed, and they 



GREEK GENIUS 

girded the dappled hides with serpents lick- 
ing their jaws; and some having in their 
arms a kid, or the wild w^helps of wolves, 
gave them white milk, all those who, having 
lately had children, had breasts still full, 
having left their infants. And they put on 
their ivy chaplets, and garlands of oak and 
blossoming yew. And one having taken a 
thyrsus, struck it against a rock, whence a 
dewy stream of water springs out; another 
placed her wand on the ground, and then 
the god sent up a spring of wine. . . ." 

This picture of the Maenads at play is fol- 
lowed by another of a different sort. The 
messenger, wdth the aid of certain shepherds, 
had attacked the Bacchantes and had been 
badly defeated. "We then, flying, avoided 
the tearing of the Bacchae, but they sprang 
on the heifers browsing the grass with un- 
armed hand, and you might see one rending 
asunder a fatted lowing calf, and others rent 
open cow^s, and you might see either ribs, or 
a cloven-footed hoof, tossed here and there. 
And hanging beneath the pine-trees the frag- 
ments were dripping, dabbled in gore; and 
the fierce bulls, before showing their fury 
with their horns, were thrown to the ground, 
overpowered by myriads of maidens' hands. 
For their pointed spear was not made 
1^42 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

bloody, but the women, hurling the thyrsi 
from their hands, wounded them, and turned 
their backs to flight, women defeating men; 
not without the aid of some god. And they 
went back again to the place whence they 
had departed, to the same fountains which 
the god had caused to spring up for them, 
and they washed off the blood; and the 
snakes with their tongues cleansed the drops 
from their cheeks. . . ." 

The effect of this tale is to harden Pen- 
theus the more. He orders out the troops. 
Nothing can dissuade him. The messenger 
warns; Dionysus begs him to submit. 
Dionysus even offers to go himself to the 
mountains and fetch the revellers to Thebes. 
But Pentheus suspects a trick of some sort, 
and clamours for his arms. It is at this 
point, and while Pentheus is plainly blear- 
eyed with enchantment, that Dionysus sug- 
gests a clever ruse, — namely, that Pentheus 
and he shall visit the mountains together and 
ensconce themselves in some safe hiding- 
place from which to view the sport. Pen- 
theus shall go disguised as a woman, and the 
god will dress him and guide him to the spot. 
They will pass through the city together, 
following deserted byways; they will spy 
upon the mysteries. Pentheus' eyes gleam 



GREEK GENIUS 

with excitement, and he goes off the stage 
to assume the required dress. Dionysus fol- 
lows him, waiting only to throw to the 
Chorus a lyric vaunt, *'0 Women, the man 
is in the toils, and he will come to the Bac- 
chae, where, dying, he will pay the penalty." 

The time during which the change of 
clothes is accomplished is occupied by the 
Chorus in a paean of exultant triumph over 
the impious man; and then re-enter Diony- 
sus leading Pentheus dressed as a woman. 
The unfortunate wretch is in the clutches of 
mania. He sees two suns, and Thebes ap- 
pears to him as if twinned into two cities. 

*'How do I look? Do I look like my 
mother, or like my aunt Ino?" 

*'Very like them; but this lock of hair is 
out of place." 

'T disarranged it in practising the Bacchic 
steps." 

"Let me set it right. But hold up your 
head ! And your girdle is crooked, and your 
fringes hang awry." 

"My right leg is all wrong, I admit; but 
the robe on the other side seems about cor- 
rect. Should I hold the thyrsus in my right 
hand or in the left?" 

"Now you are perfect." 

"I feel as if I could bear the whole moun- 
C663 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

tain on my shoulders, Bacchantes and all. I 
lay my hand to terrible things." 

*'You are terrible; and terrible are the 
sufferings that are to follow. Your renown 
shall reach to heaven." 

It is impossible to suggest in English the 
woven tissue of sarcasm of the Greek text 
throughout the play. The brilliancy of shot 
meanings, one sparkling from behind the 
other, was a passion with the Greeks. They 
loved it as they loved encrusted gold. 

Here, in this scene of the dressing up of 
Pentheus, we have comic writing of gigantic 
effectiveness ; for it is both comic and tragic. 
The malignant deity attacks his victim with 
gibes of irony. It will be remembered that 
in the scene between Faust and Mephis- 
topheles where the helplessness of mortals 
in the presence of supernatural power is 
the point in demonstration, Goethe makes 
Mephistopheles put Faust to sleep, and then 
laugh in an aside, ''Du bist noch nicht der 
Mann den Teufel fest zu halten!" So mild 
are the moderns; so terrible were the an- 
cients. 

What makes us shudder is not so much 
the idea of a god manipulating a mortal, as 
the manner in which it is carried out. No 
modern could bear either to write or to wit- 

mi 



GREEK GENIUS 

ness the cruelties practised by Dionysus 
upon Pentheus. In those places where the 
god deals gently, it is with a cat-and-mouse 
malevolence; and in the later scenes of the 
play Dionysus' asides have, as Mr. Cruick- 
shank remarks, the ferocity of a wild beast. 
We ought to judge of these horrors not 
rashly, but by the light of that whole system 
of conventional horror, and the stage sym- 
bols of horror, which were developed by the 
Greek theatre and which will be discussed 
later herein. 

While we pause to take an ice in the foyer 
between the acts of this terrific drama, let us 
recall the words of the good Mr. Tyrrell, 
who finds ''an ethical contentment and specu- 
lative calm" in the play. 

After the joint departure of Pentheus and 
Dionysus for the mountains, the Chorus 
sing another paean— "Go, ye fleet hounds of 
madness, go to the mountains where the 
daughters of Cadmus hold their company; 
drive them raving against the fanatic man 
who came to spy on the Maenads,— him in 
woman's attire," etc. We have not long to 
wait for news of the expedition; for the 
Second Messenger arrives almost imme- 
diately and gives a blood-curdling descrip- 
tion of how the miserable Pentheus has been 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

murdered by his own mother, Agave. We 
begin to feel that the dimax is approaching, 
and we are not disappointed; for, before we 
can draw breath. Agave enters, carrying in 
her arms the gory head of her son, which 
she believes to be the head of a mountain 
lion. We now realise that Agave's conver- 
sion has been the work of a madness super- 
induced by the god in punishment for her 
former apostasy. She is still out of her 
wits, and boasts of killing the lion with her 
own hands. She pets the head, comments on 
its crest, fondles its soft hair. She is in- 
terrogated by the Chorus; she is urged 
gently forward from point to point till every 
shade of her delirious vanity touching her 
imaginary prowess as a huntress is exposed, 
and every depth of humiliation is gently 
touched. 

In this scene we have the substance and 
climax of Greek tragedy,— namely, horror. 
The manner, also, in which the whole has 
moved forward, its sheets of coruscating 
irony, its flashes of godlike power exercised 
against the worm, show the triumph and 
climax of Greek method. 

The destruction of Pentheus and of 
Agave is followed by a scene very charac- 
teristic of Euripides, — namely, a scene of 

leg-} 



GREEK GENIUS 

secondary pathos, the drip under the eaves 
after the storm has passed. Cadmus and 
his wife are dismissed by the sorrowing 
Dionysus, and are compelled to wander 
away to other lands, being drawn in an ox- 
cart. This outcome is a part of the legend, 
and is therefore excellent play- writing. 
From the point of view of justice the out- 
come is absurd; for the pious Cadmus had 
welcomed the god. But for stage purposes 
a "condoling" scene was needed. After the 
rending and the madness one must have a 
little quiet weeping to accompany the sad 
return to one's senses ; it ends the play bet- 
ter. Just so, in the Hippolytus, the gory, 
dying son of Theseus is brought back upon 
the stage for a scene of reconciliation with 
his now penitent father. Euripides the 
Human, with his droppings of warm tears, 
comes round with his mop at the end of the 
play, and the nice old contadina is waiting 
to receive her pittance— which we had for- 
gotten—as we leave the box. 

The complex finale of the Bacchantes is 
arrived at slowly, and many beauties lie scat- 
tered along the way, some of them obvious, 
like the sudden appearance of Dionysus and 
the shattering of the palace walls; many of 
them incommunicable, like the changes in 

Don 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

the verse- forms and the swing of many 
pounding, sing-song metres, which would be 
intolerable in English, yet are beautiful in 
Greek. Such is the Bacchantes of Eu- 
ripides. You cannot touch it anywhere 
without receiving a shock. There is not a 
moment in the course of the play which does 
not tingle. 



n7i3 



1 



THE GREEK CHORUS — HORROR AND IRONY 

THE Bacchantes, like every other Greek 
play, is the result, first, of the legend ; 
second, of the theatre. There is always 
some cutting- and hacking, due to the diffi- 
culty of getting the legend into the building. 
Legends differ as to their dramatic possi- 
bilities, and the incidents which are to be put 
on the stage must be selected by the poet. 
The site of the play must be fixed. Above 
all, a Chorus must be arranged for. 

The choosing of a Chorus is indeed one 
of the main problems of the tragedian. If 
he can hit on a natural sort of Chorus he is 
a made man. In the Alcestis we saw that 
the whole background of grief and wailing 
was one source of the charm of the play. 
Not only are the tragic parts deepened, but 
the gayer scenes are set off by this feature. 
If the fable provides no natural and obvious 
Chorus, the playwright must bring his 
Chorus on the stage by stretching the 

1:73] 



GREEK GENIUS 

imagination of the audience. He employs 
a group of servants or of friends of the 
hero; if the play is a marine piece, he uses 
sailors. The whole atmosphere of his play 
depends upon the happiness of his choice. 

In the Agamemnon "the old men left at 
home" form the Chorus. There is enough 
dramatic power in this one idea to carry a 
play. It is so natural : the old men are on 
the spot; they are interested; they are the 
essence of the story, and yet external to it. 
These old men are, indeed, the archetype of 
all choruses,— a collection of bystanders, a 
sort of little dummy audience, intended to 
steer the great, real audience into a compre- 
hension of the play. 

The Greek dramatist found this very use- 
ful machine, the Chorus, at his elbow; but 
he was, on the other hand, greatly controlled 
by it. It had ways of its own : it inherited 
dramatic necessities. The element of con- 
vention is so very predominant in the han- 
dling of Greek choruses by the poets, that 
we have in chorus work something that may 
be regarded almost as a constant quality. By 
studying choruses one can arrive at an idea 
of the craft of Greek play- writing,— one can 
even separate the conventional from the per- 
sonal, to some extent. 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

The Greek Chorus has no mind of its 
own; it merely gives echo to the last dra- 
matic thought. It goes forward and back, 
contradicts itself, sympathises with all par- 
ties or none, and lives in a limbo. Its real 
function is to represent the slow-minded 
man in the audience. It does what he does, 
it interjects questions and doubts, it delays 
the plot and indulges in the proper emotions 
during the pauses. These functions are 
quite limited, and were completely under- 
stood in Greek times ; so much so, that in the 
typical stock tragedy of the ^schylean 
school certain saws, maxims, and reflections 
appear over and over again. One of them, of 
course, was, "See how the will of the gods 
works out in unexpected ways." Another, 
"Let us be pious, and reverence something 
that is perhaps behind the gods themselves." 
Another, "This is all very extraordinary : let 
us hope for the best." Another, "Our feel- 
ings about right and wrong must somehow 
be divine; traditional morality, traditional 
piety, are somehow right." 

Precisely the same reflections are often 
put in the mouths of the subordinate charac- 
ters, and for precisely the same purpose. "O 
may the quiet life be mine ! Give me neither 
poverty nor riches: for the destinies of the 
1751 



GREEK GENIUS 

great are ever uncertain." ''Temptation 
leads to insolence, and insolence to destruc- 
tion" ; and so forth. Such reflections serve 
the same purpose, by w^homever they are 
uttered. They underscore the moral of the 
story and assure the spectator that he has 
not missed the point. 

As religious tragedy broadened into po- 
litical and romantic tragedy, the Chorus 
gained a certain freedom in what might be 
called its inter jectional duty,— its duty, that 
is to say, of helping the plot along by proper 
questions. It gained also a Protean free- 
dom in its emotional interpretations during 
pauses. The playwrights apparently discov- 
ered that by the use of music and dancing, 
the most subtle and delicate— nay, the most 
whimsical— varieties of lyrical mood could 
be conveyed to great audiences. In spite of 
this license, however, the old duties of the 
Chorus as guardians of conservative moral- 
ity remained unchanged; and the stock 
phrases of exhortation and warning re- 
mained de rigueur in the expectation of the 
audience. Their meaning had become so well 
known that by the time of ^schylus they 
were expressed in algebraic terms. 

No man could to-day unravel a Chorus of 
^schylus if only one such Chorus existed. 

1:763 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

The truncated phrases and elHptical 
thoughts are 'clear to us because we have 
learned their meaning through reiteration, 
and because they always mean the same 
thing. The poet has a license to provide the 
Chorus with dark sayings,— dark in form, 
but simple in import. It was, indeed, his 
duty to give these phrases an oracular char- 
acter. In the course of time such phrases 
became the terror of the copyists. Obscure 
passages became corrupt in process of tran- 
scription ; and thus we have inherited a whole 
class of choral wisdom which we under- 
stand well enough (just as the top gallery 
understood it well enough) to help us in our 
enjoyment of the play. The obscurity, and 
perhaps even some part of what we call 
"corruption,'* are here a part of the stage 
convention. 

Now with regard to the Bacchantes, the 
scheme of having Maenads for a Chorus 
gave splendid promise of scenic effect; and 
the fact that, as a logical consequence, these 
ladies would have to give utterance to the 
usual maxims of piety, mixed in with the 
rhapsodies of their professional madness, 
did not daunt Euripides. He simply makes 
the Chorus do the usual chorus work with- 
out burdening his mind about character- 

C771 



GREEK GENIUS 

drawing. Thus the Maenads, at moments 
when they are not pretending to be Maenads, 
and are not singing, ''Away to the moun- 
tains, O the foot of the stag," and so on, are 
obhged to turn the other cheek and pretend 
to be interested bystanders, old gaffers wag- 
ging their beards and quoting the book of 
Proverbs. The transition from one mood 
to the other is done in a stroke of lightning, 
and seems to be independent of the music. 
That is, it seems to make no difference, so 
long as the musical schemes are filled out, 
whether the ladies are singing, "On with the 
dance, let joy be unconfined!" or, "True 
wisdom differs from sophistry, and consists 
in avoiding subjects that are beyond mortal 
comprehension." All such discrepancies 
would, no doubt, have been explained if we 
possessed the music; but the music is lost. 
It seems, at any rate, certain that the grand 
public was not expected to understand the 
w^ord-for-word meaning of choruses; hence 
their license to be obscure. We get the same 
impression from the gibes of Aristophanes, 
whose ridicule of the pompous obscurity of 
^schylus makes us suspect that the audi- 
ences could not follow the grammar in the 
lofty parts of tragedy. They accepted the 
drum-roll of horror, and understood the 

1:783 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

larger grammar of tragedy, much as we are 
now forced to do in reading the plays. 

It would seem that by following the tech- 
nique of tragedy, and by giving no thought 
to small absurdities, Euripides got a dou- 
ble effect out of his Maenads, and no one 
observed that anything was wrong. In one 
place he resorts to a dramatic device, which 
was perhaps well known in his day, — 
namely, the "conversion" of a bystander. 
After the First Messenger has given the 
great description of Dionysus' doings in the 
mountains, the Chorus, or one of them, with 
overpowering yet controlled emotion, steps 
forward and says, "1 tremble to speak free 
words in the presence of my king; yet nev- 
ertheless be it said: Dionysus is no less a 
god than the greatest of them !" This refer- 
ence to the duty of a subject is probably 
copied from a case where the Chorus was 
made up of local bystanders. In the mouth 
of a Maenad the proclamation is logically 
ridiculous; yet so strange are the laws of 
what "goes" on the stage that it may have 
been effective even here. 

Some of the choruses in the Bacchantes 
are miracles of poetic beauty, of savage pas- 
sion, of liquid power. It is hard to say 
exactly what they are, but they are wonder- 
11791 



GREEK GENIUS 

ful. And behind all there gleams from the 
whole play a sophistication as deep as the 
^gean. We observe it in little things, in 
points scored during the thrust and parry 
of argument, in the drawing-room tone of 
the whole discussion, and in a feeling as of a 
compte rendu — qtiod erat demonstrandum 
— at the end, where Dionysus lowers his 
rapier and bows to the public like a toreador. 

Aga. O Dionysus! we have sinned; thy 

pardon we implore. 
Dio. Too late have ye learned to know me ; 

ye knew me not at the proper time. 
Aga. We recognise our error ; but thou art 

too revengeful. 
Dio. Yea, for I, though a god, was slighted 

by you, 
Aga. Gods should not let their passions 

sink to man's level. 
Dio. Long ago my father Zeus ordained it 

thus. 
Aga. Alas! my aged sire, our doom is 

fixed ; 'tis woeful exile. 
Dio. Why then delay the inevitable? 

Euripides has put the legend into the 
frame very simply. He merely assumes that 
Dionysus is in the right. Dionysus was 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

justly offended : it was impiety not to recog- 
nise him. The proof of this is in the outcome. 
It is the old motif: defiance of deity pun- 
ished by madness. But in the treatment the 
horrors are worked up so vengefully, and 
the god becomes so vindictive, that there is 
danger lest the whole thing -nay appear to 
be a travesty on religion. Even in Greek 
times the character of a god was supposed to 
bear some relation to natural goodness. It 
would not do to make him out too unjust. 

The Bacchantes strains one^s sense of jus- 
tice, but arouses admiration for the way in 
which Euripides has worked the time-hon- 
oured machinery of the drama to new 
effects. By one more turn of the screw he 
has got a new situation, — yet an old one. 
Perhaps people may think he is using this 
machinery irreverently, and intends to 
throw a light backward upon the whole 
structure of Olympus. If ever there was a 
play calculated to confuse the sense of right 
and wrong, it is the Bacchantes. Yet it is 
all legitimate. He has not transgressed : his 
mouth is full of piety; he is a conservative. 
Some people even regard the Bacchantes as 
Euripides' recantation, a sort of apology for 
earlier free-thinking, a profession of faith. 
The trouble with this theory is that the mat- 



GREEK GENIUS 

ter is a little overdone: the cure is worse 
than the disease. One suspects that a caus- 
tic wit may somewhere lurk concealed 
beneath the new pietism of the old-time 
sceptic. Is he laughing at his enemies, and 
w^ill they find it out and punish him in the 
end? Such thoughts hover in the mind of 
the reader of the Bacchantes, and may have 
arisen in the mind of him that wrote it. 
Euripides may have distrusted the play. At 
any rate, the fact remains that he did not 
publish it in his lifetime. 

Heresy in Greek times seems to have be- 
come identified with "reason." There was 
no dogma in the Greek religion, so that when 
clever and sceptical persons began to think 
and to talk, nothing very definite could be 
urged against them, except that they were 
too clever by half, and had better shut up or 
they would get into trouble. This situation 
made life at Athens more uncertain than if 
there had existed a well-organised inquisi- 
tion. Heresy trials have always been a kind 
of epidemic. In one year they are in the air 
and infect politics ; in another, not. If there 
be no dogma and no religious tribunals, the 
free-thinker is at the mercy of the mob. 
The French Revolution shows the practical 
dangers which arise when the vague "sound- 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

ness" of a man's opinions begins to be ques- 
tioned by a popular assembly. The execu- 
tion of Socrates occurred five years after 
Euripides' death. 

The expressions of conservatism in the 
Bacchantes are tightened to an unendurable 
rigidity. They do not solace, but torment. 
This is part of the slight overscrewing 
v^hich is apparent in other members of the 
play. The older Greek dramas had depicted 
a hero while he was being maddened by the 
gods, — the gods, of course, remaining un- 
seen. Euripides brings the god on the stage 
and uses the maddener, not the maddened, 
as his protagonist. In doing so he gives a 
brilliant picture of a demon, calls him a god, 
and then stands, like Torquemada, proclaim- 
ing the sanctity of the faith : he is ready to 
die for it. All this makes a very remarkable 
play, and one which has puzzled the elect. 
The play is undoubtedly a great jeu d' esprit, 
— one of the greatest, — but it is a jeu 
d' esprit only by accident; it is, primarily, 
merely a play. Euripides arrived at these 
remarkable effects by following out aesthetic 
laws and by developing well-established 
principles. The moral and theological bear- 
ings of his work may even have surprised 
or a little disconcerted the author himself. 
[83] 



GREEK GENIUS 

As a monument of the Greek Genius the 
Bacchantes is more instructive than if it be- 
longed to the unapproachable class, — to 
those masterpieces of Art which defy criti- 
cism. The work is decadent. It would be 
an overstatement to say that the Bacchantes 
is the reductio ad absiirdum of Greek trag- 
edy. It is merely a great work of art, in 
which the intentions are a little more ac- 
centuated, the nuances a little more pro- 
nounced, than the greatest period would 
have permitted. It represents a decline in 
art, an overstimulation, a wringing of the 
emotions such as audiences seem to require 
after they have begun to weary of the calm- 
est and greatest kinds of art. The sculpture 
of Praxiteles, and Greek sculpture just after 
Praxiteles' time, betray the same subtle 
overaccentuation, the same mordant charm 
and power to draw blood, that Euripides 
possessed on the stage. The artists of this 
epoch know their trade almost too well. 
There is a little virtuosity in Euripides, 
which certain natures have always resented, 
both in ancient and in modern times. 

The highly specialised character of Greek 
drama may be seen by examining any com- 
plete play. The field of idea was small, as 
we know ; and the mode and process of pres- 

1:843 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

entation were categorical. Certain "feat- 
ures" followed each other on the stage. 
There was, for instance, the prologue ; there 
was the word-hacking, line-for-line dia- 
logue, the recitation by messengers, the 
antiphony of soloist and Chorus, the anapaes- 
tic passages, the dactylic passages, etc. 
There was the ironical scene in which every 
word was shadowed by a menacing sec- 
ondary meaning. Each of these matters 
was governed by rule, and had an interest 
and a tradition of its own. The choruses 
were as complex as a ritual, provided at 
enormous expense by private munificence, 
and criticised with learning and rigour by 
the connoisseurs. 

The Greek national life was in some sort 
reflected in this great mirror, the theatre. 
Down in the middle of the auditorium 
stands the Chorus, representing the people 
at large. On the stage move the myths, to 
wit, Greek Education. The irradiations of 
wit and cynicism, of piety and enthusiasm, 
of national feeling and local politics, flash 
through the amphitheatre as from a great 
reflector, and we who step back into it, even 
in imagination or for a moment, are 
strangely played upon by natural force. 
The whole Greek mind is here,— one deliver- 

1:853 



GREEK GENIUS 

ance of the whole mind, one form of its 
crystalHsation. In the Bacchantes we can 
see the machinery a little too plainly. The 
plot is a little too evident, the members of 
the drama are a little too well articulated, 
the irony too continuous. The Maenads are 
too interesting,— one feels that their head- 
dresses have been made by an expensive mil- 
liner, and copied from a tomb in Thrace. 
Dionysus is a model of loveliness, but 
decadent. Observe his love-lock and his 
walk. The recitations of the messengers are 
beautifully ''mounted" by words of prepara- 
tion, but mounted ever so little too high. 
The text of them gives a glance at the pit 
and says, "Watch me do this !" At the end 
of the Second Messenger's speech, where 
the reciter crouches and slinks off the stage 
rather than meet Agave (whose dreadful 
affliction he has been describing, and who is 
to enter behind him), we feel that the actor 
has scored a success. There is something 
about all of it that reminds us of the art of 
Louis XIV. I am saying this not so much 
in order to disparage Euripides as to throw 
light upon the greater work behind Eu- 
ripides, and which, by reason of its perfec- 
tion, we cannot criticise. These defects of 
Euripides seem to give a cue to the Greek 

:863 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

mind. The cue is sophistication. The 
Greek temple is scarcely more conventional 
than the Greek play. Every part has its 
function. "So such things should be," says 
the Athenian. Any other disposition seemed 
to him to be ugly. What has been found to 
go well on the stage must be put on the 
stage. There were plenty of dramatic 
themes which he never discovered, just as 
there are other forms of architecture which 
in Greek hands might have rivalled the tem- 
ple. But the Greek mind turns away from 
experiments. The Greek seeks for such 
solutions of things as are conformable to 
his climate, his surroundings, his civic life, 
his sport, his conversation and humour. He 
has no imagination for things outside of his 
world ; but within the limits of his world he 
has thought everything out with a fineness 
of perception and an accuracy of statement 
never known before nor since. 

There is one region of thought which the 
modern and the Greek mind have in com- 
mon, — namely, the world of aesthetics and 
of aesthetic criticism. We cannot define this 
world. We only know one thing for certain 
about it : that it is pleasant. It is a pleasure- 
loving world, where philosophy is the butler 
that hands the tea-things. When a modern 



GREEK GENIUS 

man first walks into one of Plato's dialogues, 
or reads a play of Sophocles, he feels like a 
boor entering a palace. They are all so 
clever, these Greek princes, and give the 
retort courteous and the quip modest with- 
out effort. They deal with many ideas 
which we think we understand, yet they 
arrange them in a way that we never could 
have imagined. They all seem to be playing 
a celestial game of irony. They are like 
Arabian merchants, who talk by gestures, 
and carry on mystical transactions above the 
comprehension of the intruding modern 
mind. Aristophanes is the greatest of them, 
because he alone has realised that the whole 
business is gigantic buffoonery, and that to 
laugh is the sincerest thing in the end. 

This quality of irony is a thing peculiarly 
and typically Greek. It was sedulously cul- 
tivated by the Greeks, and was considered to 
be a concomitant of intellect. It is found 
even in Homer. Irony seems to consist in 
the consciousness that the thing said is not 
the whole truth. The difference between 
Aristophanes and other Greek humourists is 
that he laughs out, while the rest merely 
smile or gaze calmly on the sea. Suppressed 
humour and silent mockery are things which 
hardly exist in the modern Anglo-Saxon 

CSS] 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

world, where the club and truncheon are in 
order rather than the stiletto and the in- 
nuendo. There have always been Italian 
poets, however, who possessed sardonic 
humour, and French writers with subtle, 
quiet irony. The whole tone of mind to 
which this kind of humour is native belongs 
rather to the Mediterranean than to the 
north of Europe. It goes with less heart and 
with more wit than the Teuton possesses. 
In dealing with anything Greek one must 
always be ready for an ''aside.'* It may be 
a stab, or it may be a mere gesture, which 
arouses the afterthought in one's mind, — 
*'Ah, that's what the fellow meant, is it?" 
The Greek comic statuettes have this same 
quizzical humour. All these things, both 
the writings and the statues, make the mod- 
ern feel like a barbarian, because of their 
subtlety. 

Greek art, nevertheless, has always been 
full of significance to the barbarians. After 
some converse with these refined Hellenes 
we begin to benefit by their cultivation. 
Take, for instance, the Greek power of en- 
joyment. What other race ever made en- 
joyment into a religion? At first we are 
shocked and unhinged by the idea, but soon 
we begin to "respond." It makes us more 

1:89:] 



GREEK GENIUS 

suave and limber to think that pleasure is a 
legitimate pursuit. We soon learn to take 
a share in the feast, almost a hand in the 
game. 

What the Greeks took up they treated 
with such logical completeness as to impart 
a symbolic character to the product. If you 
erect a perfect sphere you erect a symbol; 
and very likely other people will see in it 
intimations of philosophy. If a gymnast 
throws a disc with absolute grace, someone 
in the amphitheatre is pretty sure to think 
him a hero. This very play, the Bacchantes, 
by reason of its organic, logical perfection, 
has become a parable to many people. Who 
shall limit the meanings of a Greek poet, or 
decree what visions men shall have in gazing 
into a crystal ? Happy those who have them ! 

The Bacchantes is like an old, abandoned 
farm-wagon which lies on its back in the 
woods with its wheels in the air, and which 
from time to time is discovered by small par- 
ties of savage boys. The boys say : "Come ! 
Let us pretend that this is a fire-engine. See 
how the wheels turn about! Run, run! 
Fire, fire!" The wheels go round, and the 
boys shout with sincere joy. And yet the 
machine is not a fire-engine, but a wagon; 
and the Bacchantes is not an allegorical 

Do] 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

fable, but a play,— the fiercest play ever 
written. 

To return to the drama. The sophistica- 
tion of the Greek mind is what stimulates 
the modern. The Greek could count up to 
one hundred in art ; we only to seventy-five. 
We misinterpret him through crediting that 
to emotion which is merely due to conven- 
tion. For instance, the hideous cruelty of 
Greek tragedy is largely conventional, plas- 
tic, contrapuntal. It was in following this 
inner logic that the audience found pleasure, 
somewhat as we find pleasure at a modern 
concert in following the inner logic of a 
very complex sonata. There are no facts 
in music, and so in Greek tragedy there are 
no facts. It is all an intellectual schema, or 
progression of ideas, built up and led on 
towards a climax. All the externals of the 
Greek Drama are intentionally and obviously 
unreal. They must operate only as hints to 
the imagination; otherwise the illusion will 
be destroyed. If you tack a real bow-knot 
upon the picture of a child, you will destroy 
the life of the picture. So, on the Greek 
stage all realism is avoided. For instance, 
when Agave comes upon the scene with the 
head of her son in her arms, she is carrying 
a papier-mache image of a head, much above 

n9i3 



GREEK GENIUS 

life-size, and painted with gore. The body 
of Pentheus consists of fragments which are 
brought upon the stage immediately after- 
wards. The only proper stage handling of 
such scenes as this, which were not unusual 
in Greek tragedy, is the marionette system : 
"Here is Charlemagne, here is the head of 
the Soldan," etc. Thus alone can the story 
be kept upon its true stage in the mind. If 
you tell a bloody history to a child, and keep 
the setting unreal, it makes no difference 
what atrocities the plot involves. In Greece 
the stage language (i.e., the verse- forms, 
the dresses, and the acting) was provided 
by custom, and the playwright was expected 
to stick at nothing in the use of them. They 
are a kind of great alphabet which must be 
accepted m toto. 

There is a wide-spread belief that the 
Greeks avoided the horrible. This is, per- 
haps, founded on Horace's remark that 
Medea does not slaughter her children be- 
fore the public. In any event, the belief 
seems not to correspond with the facts. The 
Greeks seem to adopt any dramatic device 
that will arouse horror most effectually. 
Now it is infinitely more effective to have 
Medea's children slain by their mother's 
hand just behind the scenes, where their 
1921 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

unavailing cries can be heard by the au- 
dience, than to have her kill them before the 
footlights. So, also, in the slaughter of 
Agamemnon, the prolonged deliberation of 
the Chorus— who confer as to whether or 
not it is their duty to do anything about the 
murder, vying with one another in the sense- 
lessness and incompetence of their sugges- 
tions, while the howls of Agamemnon fill 
the theatre— is more horrible than any mur- 
der on the stage could possibly have been 
made. So, too, in Euripides' Orestes, after 
Orestes and Pylades have entered the palace 
for the purpose of murdering Helen, there 
is an awe-striking moment when the Chorus 
hears someone coming down the path, and 
fears lest the whole dreadful plot may fail. 
The cries of Helen have been heard, but are 
not decisive. Neither the Chorus nor the 
audience knows just what is happening, and 
this uncertainty intensifies the horror. There 
are moments in Macbeth where the same 
situation is staged by almost the same meth- 
ods. These breathless pauses in tragedy are 
due to the fact that the unseen is more dread- 
ful than the seen. 

But there is an independent reason for the 
avoidance of death itself on the Greek stage. 
If personages were not permitted to die 

[93 3 



GREEK GENIUS 

there, it is because there was no way of get- 
ting rid of the bodies. The slain could not 
get up and walk off, or be carried off, with- 
out introducing a ridiculous element. Alces- 
tis is allowed to die on the stage because the 
circumstances make it possible to remove 
her body dramatically. 

How ineffectual in appearance are kill- 
ings in real life! A man is shot, or struck 
by a train, or jumps from a burning build- 
ing. It is all over in a moment ; it is terne, 
it is voiceless, it is real. The Greek stage 
avoids horrors of this kind because they are 
not dramatically useful ; but the Greek stage 
has horrors of its own that are worse than 
they. 

The Elizabethan drama, which had no 
special laws or conventions, but tried every- 
thing, used sometimes to indulge in realistic 
horrors. Such things, however, proved to 
be disgusting rather than horrible. They 
reveal in their authors an imperfect ac- 
quaintance with dramatic law. If you set 
upon the stage Thyestes eating a pie made 
of his own children's flesh, and if you make 
him fall backward in convulsions when he 
learns of what he has done, you can never 
make the scene as awful as it becomes 
through the horror of a third party who 

1:943 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

gives an account of it. The emotion must 
be instrumental. All the inner resonance of 
the drama will be interrupted by any appeal 
that comes from realism. Everything that 
happens on the stage must be taken up into 
the v^hirling symphony of the whole per- 
formance, the value and force of each ele- 
ment being assigned to it by the poet. 



1:95 n 



VI 

PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY — OXFORD 

PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY is 
the best known scholar in the British 
Empire, and is the most widely beloved 
scholar of the present epoch. Whatever be 
his claims to learning as weighed in the 
Plutonic haunts of technical work (of 
which the nether gods alone are cognisant), 
his enormous literacy and his easy command 
over the whole book-world appear like a 
miracle to the general reader. Beneath 
the authority of his official post and the 
necromancy of his erudition walks a literary 
talent of a very high order. His suavity, his 
personal charm, his real humility, his hu- 
mour, his freedom from dogmatism, the 
Orpheus-like serenity with which he walks 
through the Plutonic regions, illuminating 
scholarship as he goes with the interest of a 
fairy-tale, make him the adored friend of 
every reader. The Rise of the Greek Epic 
seems to be the book which modern educa- 

1:973 



GREEK GENIUS 

tion was waiting for, the book that should 
recover to Hterature the lost territory which 
the whirlpools of archaeology and etymology 
had eaten away, and should reinstate Hu- 
manism as the Regent of Learning. 

This book. The Rise of the Greek Epic, is 
a review of modern speculation as to the 
form of Homer's poems. Its main thesis 
is simple, and its methods are the critical and 
verifiable methods of modern research. Yet 
no one can read the book without having his 
conceptions enlarged, not only as touching 
Greek literature, but as touching the whole 
history of literary expression. 

The province of criticism is, however, but 
one field of Professor Murray's activity. 
There are two Murrays, and they bear a 
somewhat paradoxical relation to each 
other. There is Murray the critical scholar, 
whose work has an imaginative, stimulating 
value to the student of Greek; and there is 
Murray the author of poetic translations, 
chiefly of Euripides, whose work is essen- 
tially non-critical, even anti-critical, and 
who fulfils to the student of Greek literature 
the office of an ignis fatuus. 

If in the following paper a protest is 
made against the last mentioned side of 
Murray's influence, this is because of the 
1981 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

magnitude of his influence, and because of 
the subtlety of the questions involved, which 
make sharp speaking necessary to clearness. 
Murray the critic is the genial scholar 
named above. In The Rise of the Greek 
Epic he enters the field of Homeric criti- 
cism. Now the Homeric Question during 
the last one hundred and fifty years became 
a great bazaar : it is like a covered market a 
hundred yards long,— a halle, — filled with 
furiously active tailors and sewers of patch- 
work. They sit upon piles of bagging, each 
in his booth heaped with bales of work. 
Slaves stagger to and fro under new and 
miscellaneous plunder which the archaeolo- 
gists are momently consigning to the bazaar 
from the quarried ruins of every Mediter- 
ranean shore. Bearded men wrangle, and 
dim-eyed enthusiasts attack their theses. 
They rip and sew, sift and assay, they heap 
and scatter like madmen. The general 
reader looks upon the scene in smiles and in 
despair. Then Murray enters and begins 
talking in a casual way about Homer. He 
is very gentle. Anyone can understand 
what he says. He is explaining what some 
of the fury is about. He comes from the 
open air and brings the daylight with him. 
He is as likely to illustrate a point with 

1:993 



GREEK GENIUS 

something that he saw in the street five min- 
utes before as with a Hne from the Pen- 
tateuch. He is going to show you what sort 
of a thing Hterature was in its beginnings. 
He pauses over a pile of manuscripts as he 
enters, picks up one, and shows its drift. A 
slave passes with an armful of broken crock- 
ery. He begs pardon of the slave, borrows 
a potsherd for a moment, and illustrates his 
idea with it; returns it, and passes on. We 
follow him through the emporium, and in 
an hour or two we come to understand 
something about the Homeric pandemo- 
nium. We know not how much is Murray's 
own, or to what extent he is an interpreter 
of others; but before he has finished his 
rounds we become convinced that his gen- 
eral view must be true. Something of the 
sort is indubitably the true view. That the 
Iliad and Odyssey are in their living merits 
a part of the great Attic period in Greek 
literature ; that they are archaic and artificial 
in their language ; that, in the form in which 
we know them, they represent the last recen- 
sion of a body of myth which is hundreds of 
years old; that no categorical answer is to 
be looked for as to any of the detailed ques- 
tions about their origin,— these things we 
believe and see to be true after reading the 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

book, in the same manner as if we had dis- 
covered them for ourselves. And this is 
what Murray desires to make us perceive. 

The secret of Murray's power seems to 
lie in the truth that illustration is more tell- 
ing than argument. His art keeps his thesis 
afloat and throws the glamour of a fairy- 
tale upon the dreadful citations. You are 
ever in a magic sea strewn with argosies of 
Oriental plunder. Meanwhile, Gilbert Mur- 
ray himself is before you, the man of the 
afternoon chat, as modern and familiar a 
figure as London can show. Here is the 
triumph of British cultivation. There is a 
good sense and a good humour about the 
book, a non-dogmatic social element. Here 
is seen the same bonhomie and avoidance of 
extremes which are at the bottom of Eng- 
land's political greatness. 

The second Murray— namely, the versifier 
and translator of Euripides— must now be 
considered. He is an English poet of a very 
definite literary ancestry. He belongs to the 
old Neo-Hellenic Oxford teaching, — one 
might almost call it a school of thought. He 
is a scion of that traditional English scholar- 
ship of which Matthew Arnold and Swin- 
burne are examples. This tradition is wider 
than a mere school of poetry : it is a caste of 



GREEK GENIUS 

thought, and a mode of aesthetic, quasi- 
moral feeling. 

Let the reader recall Mallock's New Re- 
public, which remains as the best monument 
of a distinct historic eddy in the thought 
and influence of Oxford. This little swirl 
was not more than an eddy: it never com- 
prehended the whole of Oxford even in its 
day of plenitude. 

Mallock gently ridiculed the poses of this 
Christian-Pagan University Humanism in 
his famous mock-sermon, which was sup- 
posed to represent Jowett's manner. In 
another place he makes Jowett say : "Chris- 
tianity includes all other religions, even any 
honest denial of itself." 

In this phrase of Mallock's we have the 
philosophic crux of the whole matter. Gil- 
bert Murray the poet is an aftermath of this 
Victorian culture, and in his mouth are the 
charming accents of all that old-fashioned, 
tinted cultivation. This cultivation is pre- 
cious, mannered, Euphuistic. If accepted 
as part of the drawing-room, where the 
lights are shaded, this music is not un- 
pleasing. There is a sordino on every 
instrument, and none but the sweetest reso- 
lutions are permitted. But when daylight 
meets the page and brings this school of 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

musing into competition with open-air liter- 
ature, its weaknesses are revealed. It is all 
candy. It belongs, indeed, to that class of 
artificial work, not without value, of which 
many epochs, including the twelfth century 
and the Renaissance, have provided exam- 
ples. Walter Pater's books are of the same 
school. We must remember the Cortegiano 
in reading them. There is only one point of 
view from which Murray's translations can 
arouse antagonism,, or even just reproba- 
tion,— namely, when they are used as an 
introduction to Greek literature. 

Gilbert Murray the poet has a note, a 
charm, a lyric gift of his own. The follow- 
ing verses from the Hippolytus are an ex- 
ample of his genius. The whole translation 
is very nearly equal to them in sweetness. 
They may serve to remind the reader of this 
author's merits : 

"Could I take me to some cavern for mine 
hiding. 
In the hilltops where the sun scarce 
hath trod ; 
Or a cloud make the home of mine 
abiding, 
As a bird among the bird-droves of 
God! 

D033 



GREEK GENIUS 

Could I wing me to my rest amid the 

roar 
Of the deep Adriatic on the shore, 
Where the waters of Eridanus are clear, 
And Phaeton's sad sisters by his grave 
Weep into the river, and each tear 

Gleams, a drop of amber, in the wave: 

To the strand of the daughters of the 
Sunset, 
The Apple-tree, the singing and the 
gold; 
Where the mariner must stay him from 
his onset. 
And the red wave is tranquil as of old; 
Yea, beyond that Pillar of the End 
That Atlas guardeth, would I wend ; 
Where a voice of living waters never 
ceaseth 
In God's quiet garden by the sea. 
And Earth, the ancient life-giver, in- 
creaseth 
Joy among the meadows, like a tree." 

This is very charming, but not very 
Greek. There is, in spite of its merits, a 
monotony of feeling about this and other 
Hellenising British poetry, and a certain 
preoccupation with God, which are not 
D043 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

found in Greek. There is generally a sense 
of variety in Greek poetry and a substratum 
of wit or shrewdness. The plaintive note 
and the highly moral note, which the British 
Victorian School so much affects, do occur 
now and then in Greek, but they do not 
predominate. Of course all mythology 
deals with gods; and by translating every 
reference to Olympus with a big G, this 
school has produced some very interesting 
literary flavours. Religion is their pet 
thought. They are not satisfied unless they 
have stitched Greek religion (whatever it 
was) and English religion (whatever it 
ought to be) into some sort of harmony. In 
their works the Bible is subtly alluded to 
through the use of biblical words, and 
Dionysus and Christ are delicately jumbled. 
There is, it must be confessed, a little too 
much gentleness everywhere in the aesthetic 
literature of modern England, as if a drop 
of sweet oil had been added to life. All this 
comes from a genuine, intimately English, 
ethical development; traces of it may be 
seen in Tennyson. These English gentle- 
men are admirable fellows, and the world is 
better and richer for them in many ways. 
But it is impossible to remain in the state of 
mind in which they live and to render the 



GREEK GENIUS 

Greek drama, because their vehicle is one 
which transmutes everything into falsetto 
sentiment. 

The Greek genius is so different from the 
modern English genius that the two cannot 
understand each other. How shall we come 
to see this clearly? The matter is difficult 
in the extreme because we are all soaked in 
modern feeling, and in America we are all 
drenched in British influence. The desire of 
Britain to annex ancient Greece, the deep- 
felt need that the English writers and poets 
of the nineteenth century have shown to edge 
and nudge nearer to Greek feeling, is fa- 
miliar to all of us. Browning expresses his 
Hellenic longings by paraphrasing Greek 
myths ; Swinburne, by his hymeneal strains ; 
Matthew Arnold, by sweetness and light; 
Gilbert Murray, by sweetness and pathos; 
and all through the divine right of Victorian 
expansion. 

It has been a profoundly unconscious 
development in all of these men. They have 
instinctively and innocently attached their 
views of life to Euripides and to the other 
great Attic writers. In doing so they have 
developed a w^hole artificial language of their 
own, as conventional as the language of 
Homer. And, curiously enough, there is not 
DOS] 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

to be found in the whole length and breadth 
of letters a dialect more unlike the Greek 
than the jargoning of this especial school of 
warblers. The reason is that the exquisite 
music of the fraternity has set a gold cage 
about each singer. The lyric laws of this 
tradition exclude open-air sounds, and all 
the world is curtained off in order to seclude 
a particular kind of throb. 

The tyranny of literary convention is 
known to every writer. If he will translate 
Homer into Shakespearian blank verse, he 
must throw in a little Shakespearian bom- 
bast, or the verse will balk like an underfed 
horse. If he will put Horace into the Spen- 
serian stanza, he must dose it somewhat 
with Elizabethan ornament. Indeed, he 
cannot help doing so. The excessive ar- 
tificiality of the ancestral school of verse to 
which Murray belongs, and of which he is 
a sincere exponent, could not help dyeing 
Murray's paraphrases of Greek texts in the 
blood of Shelley. "What better tint could 
he put on?" you cry. Yes, yes; but the 
Greek is lost. 

Let us take an example. It was Robert 
Browning who first cast **God" into British 
Victorian poetry, — "God" as a sort of pig- 
ment or colophon ; "God" as an exclamation, 



GREEK GENIUS 

a parenthesis, an adverb, a running com- 
ment, an exordium, a thesis, and a conclu- 
sion. Murray inherits this idiosyncrasy : he 
has taken it in with his poetic milk. One is 
tempted to write ^'Browning" against many 
a page of Murray's Euripides. 

So far as religion is concerned, the 
Greeks do seem upon occasion to have dealt 
with an idea which is best rendered by our 
word "God." It is an idea that does not 
occur often in Greek, although there is 
hardly a page of Greek poetry without some 
reference to the unseen agency of spirits, — 
a god, some god, the gods, fate, chance, 
destiny, etc. In the older literal translations 
of Greek poetry into English the word 
"God" seems to be avoided altogether, and 
"Jove" is used for "Zeus." In the more 
recent literal translations the name of God 
is not altogether omitted. For instance, in 
Coleridge's translation of Euripides' Medea, 
the word occurs half a dozen times, chiefly 
in phrases such as "God grant," "so help me 
God," "by God's grace," etc. Willamovitz, 
the great German scholar, uses the word 
"Gott," so far as I can find, only twice in his 
poetic version of Medea— i.e., "Will's Gott" 
and "Behiit' Euch Gott." In Murray's 
translation of the same play "God" occurs 
DOS] 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

forty-three times, not counting "the god," 
''a god," etc. Such dealing destroys the 
Greek atmosphere. Horace in Spenserian 
verse would be Roman compared to this. 

There is, however, a further and very 
mysterious phenomenon connected with 
Murray's metrical transcriptions. They are 
accompanied by prefaces and notes in the 
style of the Oxfordian litterateurs of forty 
years ago. His verse vehicle has for the 
nonce keeled the whole man over into 
mawkish cultivation. It is incredible, and a 
paradox in psychology, that Murray the 
scholar should have penned these notes. 

The ingenuous young student who should 
look into Euripides himself after reading 
Murray's translations and introductions to 
the poet would experience very much such 
a surprise as a boy does who finds a snake in 
a bird's nest. The two creatures have noth- 
ing to do with each other, except that under 
certain circumstances the one devours the 
other,— that is to say, the sceptic devours 
the sentimentalist. 

The purpose of the following pages is to 
protect that ingenuous boy, to point out some 
extravagances of this intricate world, and tO' 
prepare the good youth of America for the 
complications of European cultivation. 



GREEK GENIUS 

The relation between Euripides and Mur- 
ray is not a thing that needs to be treated in 
extenso, as, for instance, by comparing 
everything that the one has said about the 
other. The question is one of transfusion, 
of chemical transformation. It can be 
studied by samples and piecemeal. The 
discussion requires merely the examination 
of elements which never vary. For pur- 
poses of convenience I shall take up Mur- 
ray's translation of the Bacchantes, because 
that play is in itself so very remote from 
British feeling that the divagations of the 
translator and commentator are brought 
into picturesque and startling contrast with 
the Greek. The sentimentalism of this 
British school when it fondles Greek intel- 
lect is like Agave with the head of Pentheus 
in her arms. 

To the poet Murray, Euripides is a mis- 
understood man w^ho wrote his BaccJiantes 
to express a philosophic faith. Euripides 
was, it appears, living in Macedonia in exile 
at the time, and was rejoicing over his 
escape from his enemies. In the volume 
entitled Euripides (Longmans, Green, 
1912), Murray, after describing the cult of 
Dionysus, says : 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

'The Bacchanals in this play worshipped 
him [Dionysus] by his many names : 

'lacchos, Bromios, Lord, 
God of God born' ; and all the mountain felt 
And worshipped with them, and the wild 

things knelt, 
And ramped and gloried, and the wilderness 
Was filled with moving voices and dim 

stress. 

That is the kind of god he [Euripides] cele- 
brates." (Introductory Essay, p. Ix.) 

Murray continues on a later page : 

*'Could not the wise men of Athens un- 
derstand what a child feels, what a wild 
beast feels, what a poet feels, that to live — 
to live in the presence of Nature, of Dawn 
and Sunset, of eternal mysteries and discov- 
eries and wonders— is in itself a joyous 
thing? 

'' 'Love thou the day and night,' he says in 
another place. 'It is only so that Life can 
be made what it really is, a Joy: by loving 
not only your neighbour — he is so vivid an 
element in life that, unless you do love him, 
he will spoil all the rest! — but the actual 



GREEK GENIUS 

details and processes of living/ Life be- 
comes like the voyage of Dionysus himself 
over magic seas, or rather, perhaps, like the 
more chequered voyage of Shelley's lovers : 

While Night 
And Day, and Storm and Calm pursue their 

flight. 
Our ministers across the boundless sea. 
Treading each other's heels unheededly' — 

the alternations and pains being only *min- 
isters' to the great composite joy. 

"It seemed to Euripides, in that favourite 
metaphor of his, which was always a little 
more than a metaphor, that a God had been 
rejected hy the world that he came from. 
Those haggard, striving, suspicious men, 
full of ambition and the pride of intellect, 
almost destitute of emotion,— unless polit- 
ical hatreds can be called emotion,— were 
hurrying through Life in the presence of 
august things which they never recognised, 
of joy and beauty which they never dreamed 
of. Thus it is that *the world's wise are not 
wise.' 

'\ . . . It is a mysticism which includes 
democracy as it includes the love of your 
neighbour. They are both necessary details 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

in the inclusive end. It implies that trust in 
the 'simple man' which is so characteristic 
of most idealists and most reformers. It 
implies the doctrine of Equality— a doctrine 
essentially religious and mystical, continu- 
ally disproved in every fresh sense in which 
it can be formulated, and yet remaining one 
of the living faiths of men." (76., p. Ixiii 
et seq. ) 

Now let the ingenuous stripling from 
Oshkosh whose father has saved money to 
send him to college in New Haven, and who 
finds Murray's Euripides on the list of 
books to be read, try to connect this ex- 
quisite kissing of his three fingers by an 
Oxford professor with anything that can be 
found in the poetry of Euripides, or in any 
other Greek thing whatever. What cue has 
the boy to the mystery ? What aid towards 
its solution can he find in the pages of the 
old Attic artist, who is more addicted to set- 
ting riddles than to solving them ? 

Murray's state of mind at such moments 
cannot be reached by any intellectual appeal. 
No matter what button is touched, the same 
bell rings. "It is," he says, "a dangerous 
and somewhat vulgar course to deduce from 
a poet's works direct conclusions about his 



GREEK GENIUS 

real life." No sooner has he said this than 
he proceeds to deduce the most recondite 
conclusions as to the poet's private life from 
verses which suggest nothing personal. 
Euripides, according to Murray, "felt like 
a hunted animal escaped from its pursuers, 
like a fawn fled to the forest, says one lyric 
in which the personal note is surely audible 
as a ringing undertone (1. 862) : 

'Oh, feet of a fawn to the greenwood fled. 

Alone in the grass and the loveliness. 
Leap of the hunted, no more in dread' . . . 

''But there is still a terror in the distance 
behind him; he must go onward yet, to 
lonely regions where no voice of either man 
or hound may reach." (lb., p. Ixi.) 

That leaping fawn was the call of the wild 
to Murray. He throws his principles of 
criticism to the wind, because he has seen 
an opportunity of winding his own peculiar 
note on his own elfin horn. As a matter of 
fact, leaping animals and darting birds were 
almost a specialty of Euripides, even before 
his banishment. He must surely have loved 
wild animals, and he certainly knew the 
value of them in a chorus ; but no one except 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

a wizard could guess in which of his animal 
similes Euripides was describing himself. 

I shall now take up some passages from 
the same Introductory Essay in which Pro- 
fessor Murray points out things of impor- 
tance which are to be found in the work 
itself. I begin with a passage in which 
Murray wilfully perverts the Greek mean- 
ing. 

'* 'What else is wisdom ?' Euripides asks 
in a marvellous passage : 

'What else is wisdom ? What of man*s 
endeavour 

Or God's high grace so lovely and so 
great ? 

To stand from fear set free, to breathe 
and wait ; 

To hold a hand upHfted over Hate; 

And shall not loveliness be loved for- 
ever ?' 

''He [Euripides] was escaped and happy; 
he was beyond the reach of Hate." 

This certainly is a marvellous find, and 
drives us to the original. The words, it ap- 
pears, are part of a chorus sung imme- 
diately after Pentheus has gone forth to his 



GREEK GENIUS 

death (1. 877). A close translation is as 
follows : 

''Ah! What is wisdom (i.e., man's wit) ? 
What fairer boon hath God given mortals 
than to raise the hand in victory o'er the foe ? 
What is fair is loved forever." 

The note in Mr. Beckwith's school edition 
says: 

"Moral greatness with the ancient Greeks 
consisted no less in an immutable hatred 
towards foes than in a constant love towards 
friends." 

The last words, "What is honourable is 
always pleasant," were, it seems, a proverb. 

The 'marvellous passage' cited by Mur- 
ray is, in fact, a curse by the Chorus, and 
the curse is repeated, word for word, being 
sung twice for the sake of emphasis. Does 
Gilbert Murray believe that the Greek text 
here will bear his interpretation? The 
savagery of the Chorus in the Bacchantes is 
horrible, but it is extremely Hellenic ; and it 
is, one might say, the mainspring of the 
play. Murray's translation is not a transla- 
tion, not a transcription nor a rendering of 
any sort, but a flat denial of the original and 

Die] 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

the insertion of the opposite sentiment in the 
mouth of the character. Can this be justi- 
fied? Of course, with metrical translations 
an immense license is necessary if the trans- 
lator is to do anything poetic. But has the 
translator a right to make up something else 
and then say he found it in the original ? 

The poet Murray must have puzzled for 
some time over this text before finding his 
message in it. At last he perceives that by 
introverting the sense of it something can 
be done. He adjusts the sordino, and, as 
the melancholy Jaques would say, he draws 
the Oxford out of it as a weasel sucks an 
egg. But he stops not here. The mood of 
inspiration is on him. He proceeds to work 
the passage up into a Selhstportrait of Eu- 
ripides, and to represent the old poet as 
blessing his enemies from the serenity of his 
retreat in Macedonia. 

Let us now take up two passages in which 
Murray has introduced modern theological 
ideas. ''Nay, he [Euripides]," says Murray, 
'*was safe, and those who hated him were 
suffering. A judgment seemed to be upon 
them, these men who had resolved to have 
no dealings with *the three deadly enemies 
of Empire, Pity and Eloquent Sentiments 
and the Generosity of Strength*; who lived, 

1:117:1 



GREEK GENIUS 

as Thucydides says in another passage (vi, 
90), in dreams of wider and wider conquest, 
—the conquest of Sicily, of South Italy, of 
Carthage and all her Empire, of every coun- 
try that touched the sea. They had forgotten 
the essence of religion, forgotten the eternal 
laws, and the judgment in wait for those 
who ^worship the Ruthless Will'; who 
dream 

'Dreams of the proud man, making great 

And greater ever 
Things that are not of God.' 

'Tt is against the essential irreligion implied 
in these dreams that he appeals in the same 
song: 

*And is thy faith so much to give ? 
Is it so hard a thing to see. 
That the Spirit of God, whate'er it be. 
The Law that abides and falters not, ages 

long. 
The Eternal and Nature-born— these 
things be strong?' " 

Now, as to the "dreams of the proud 
man," etc. A close translation of the sen- 
tence in which the words occur is as fol- 
lows: 

"The might of God moves slowly, yet is 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

it sure. It punishes those who honour the 
senseless pride of men, and ahke those who, 
distraught in mind, exalt not the things of 
God." 

With regard to the verse, "And is thy 
faith so much to give?" etc., a close transla- 
tion is as follows : 

"Man shall not press thought or act be- 
yond the law. Tis little to give— the faith 
that the power divine, whate'er it be, that 
which ages long have stablished and which 
is born of nature's law— that this hath 
strength." 

In translating these last two passages Pro- 
fessor Murray has given the sense of the 
passages, except for the theology implied in 
the capital letters. We next come to a case 
that looks like criminal misrepresentation of 
the Greek meaning. 

"In one difficult and beautiful passage," 
says Murray, "Euripides seems to give us 
his own apology : 

'Knowledge, we are not foes ! 

I seek thee diligently ; 
But the world with a great wind blows, 

Shining, and not from thee ; 



GREEK GENIUS 

Blowing to beautiful things, 

On amid dark and light, 
Till Life through the trammellings 

Of Laws that are not the Right, 
Breaks, clean and pure, and sings. 

Glorying to God in the height !' 

"One feels grateful for that voice from 
the old Euripides amid the strange, new 
tones of the BacchcB." 

Now it appears that this difficult and 
beautiful' passage is a well known corrupt 
text (1. 1005), one of those choral inherit- 
ances where the general meaning is clear but 
the text, through the errors of copyists, has 
become hopeless and irrecoverable. Mr. A. 
H. Cruickshank, in his school edition of the 
Clarendon Press Series, gives alternate 
translations, whose differences depend on 
suggested changes in the text. I copy them 
both, as they illustrate the difficulties of the 
subject. Mr. Cruickshank is obliged to 
make use of paraphrases and of expansions 
in order to get anything like a clear meaning 
from the passage. He first translates it as 
follows : 

"I do not rejoice pursuing wisdom, so as 
to offend the gods, but (I do rejoice pur- 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

suing) the other things, great and illus- 
trious, things of a class which ever tend to 
what is noble,— namely, to lead a pious and 
pure life day and night." 



His second translation is as follows : 

"I envy not (false) wisdom, but I rejoice 
pursuing those other matters, which are 
manifestly important, ever leading life to 
noble ends, — namely, that a man should day 
and night be pious and holy, and honour 
the gods by rejecting all the ordinances that 
are beyond the pale of justice." 

Considering the darkness which broods 
over this particular passage, it might seem 
disingenuous in Murray to translate the pas- 
sage as he has done, ending up with: 
"Glorying to God in the height!", — and 
then add: ''One feels grateful for that voice 
from the old Euripides amid the strange, 
new tones of the Bacchcc." But it is not 
disingenuous; it is the very reverse: it is 
ingenuous, most ingenuous. The Neo-Hel- 
lene of Oxford regards a Greek play as a 
bundle of Sibylline leaves blown wildly 
about a cavern. The prophetess thrusts one 



GREEK GENIUS 

of them into the scholar's hand, and he 
sings. To the Neo-Hellene a Greek drama- 
tist is a moody, groping sort of person who 
lives in a maze of intimations, — intimations 
of Oxford,— and commits almost anything 
to paper that passes through his head. Says 
Murray in this same Introductory Essay : 

"Probably all dramatists who possess 
strong personal beliefs yield at times to the 
temptation of using one of their characters 
as a mouthpiece for their own feelings. And 
the Greek Chorus, a half -dramatic, half- 
lyrical creation, both was, and was felt to 
be, particularly suitable for such use. Of 
course a writer does not — or at least should 
not — use the drama to express his mere 
Views' on ordinary and commonplace ques- 
tions, to announce his side in politics or his 
sect in religion. But it is a method wonder- 
fully contrived for expressing those vaguer 
faiths and aspirations which a man feels 
haunting him and calling to him, but which 
he cannot state in plain language or uphold 
with a full acceptance of responsibility. 
You can say the thing that wishes to be said ; 
you 'give it its chance' ; you relieve your 
mind of it. And if it proves to be all non- 
sense—well, it is not you that said it. It is 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

only a character in one of your plays!" 
{Ih., p. Iviii.) 

It would be difficult to say anything more 
misleading than this about the Greek theatre, 
where every word was a stone in the arch of 
the play, every character was provided by 
tradition, every thought was conventional. 
The structural nature of a Greek drama is 
known to everyone, and is perfectly well 
known to Mr. Gilbert Murray; but the 
fumes from his tripod cover his brain as he 
writes his translations, and these fumes per- 
vade the introductions and the notes to the 
poems. The merit of the verse itself is due 
to this very envelope of steaming inspira- 
tion and poetic sentiment. But the waking 
Murray ought really to join in warning the 
public against the hymning, dreamy, irre- 
sponsible Murray, the poet Murray who is 
spreading grotesque ideas about Euripides 
beneath every shaded lamp in the Anglo- 
Saxon world. 

We are thus compelled, then, to look 
askance at one very visible and very charm- 
ing branch of Greek scholarship at Oxford, 
and to sink new foundations of our own, if 
we would escape the cloying influence of this 
literary school. Perhaps there is not any- 

D233 



GREEK GENIUS 

thing novel or anything very desperate in 
such a situation. The tendency of universi- 
ties has ever been to breed cliques and secret 
societies, to produce embroideries and start 
hothouses of specialised feeling. They do 
well in doing this : it is all they can do. We 
should look upon them as great furnaces of 
culture, largely social in their influence, 
which warm and nourish the general tem- 
perament of a nation. 

Would that in America we had a local 
school of classic cultivation half as inter- 
esting as this Neo-Hellenism of Oxford, 
quaint and non-intellectual as it is! It is 
alive and it is national. While most absurd 
from the point of view of universal culture, 
it is most satisfactory from the domestic 
point of view,— as, indeed, everything in 
England is. If in America we shall ever 
develop any true universities, they will have 
faults of their own. Their defects will be 
of a new strain, no doubt, and will reflect 
our national shortcomings. These thoughts 
but teach us that we cannot use other peo- 
ple's eyes or other people's eye-glasses. We 
have still to grind the lenses through which 
we shall, in our turn, observe the classics. 



1:1243 



VII 

CONCLUSION 

THERE is one thing that we should 
never do in deaHng with anything 
Greek. We should not take a scrap of the 
Greek mind and keep on examining it until 
we find a familiar thought in it. No bit of 
Greek art is to be viewed as a thing in itself. 
It is always a fragment, and gets its value 
from the whole. Every bit of carved stone 
picked up in Athens is a piece of architec- 
ture; so is every speech in a play, every 
phrase in a dialogue. You must go back 
and bring in the whole Theatre or the whole 
Academy, and put back the fragment in its 
place by means of ladders, before you can 
guess at its meaning. The inordinate sig- 
nificance that seems to gleam from every 
broken toy of Greece results from this very 
quality,— that the object is a part of some- 
thing else. Just because the thing has no 
meaning by itself, it implies so much. Some- 
how it drags the whole life of the Greek 



GREEK GENIUS 

nation before you. The favourite Greek 
maxim, ** Avoid excess," does the same. It 
keeps telHng you to remember yesterday and 
to-morrow; to remember the palccstra and 
the market-place; above all, to remember 
that the very opposite of what you say is 
also true. Wherever you are, and whatever 
doing, you must remember the rest of the 
Greek world. 

It is no wonder that the Greeks could not 
adopt the standards and contrivances of 
other nations, while their own standards and 
contrivances resulted from such refined and 
perpetual balancing and shaving of values. 
This refinement has become part of their 
daily life; and whether one examines a 
drinking-cup or a dialogue or a lyric, and 
whether the thing be from the age of Homer 
or from the age of Alexander, the fragment 
always gives us a glimpse into the same 
Greek world. The foundation of this world 
seems to be the Myth; and as the world 
grew it developed in terms of Myth. The 
Greek mind had only one background. Ath- 
letics and Statuary, Epic and Drama, Re- 
ligion and Art, Scepticism and Science, 
expressed themselves through the same 
myths. In this lies the fascination of Greece 
for us. What a complete cosmos it is ! And 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

how different from any other civiHsation! 
Modern Hfe, Hke modern language, is a mon- 
strous amalgam, a conglomeration and mess 
of idioms from every age and every clime. 
The classic Greek hangs together like a 
wreath. It has been developed rapidly, dur- 
ing a few hundred years, and has an inner 
harmony like the temple. Language and 
temple, — each was an apparition; each is, in 
its own way, perfect. 

Consider wherein Rome differed from 
Greece. The life of the Romans was a 
patchwork, like our own. Their religion 
was formal, their art imported, their liter- 
ature imitative; their aims were practical, 
their interests unimaginative. All social 
needs were controlled by political considera- 
tions. This sounds almost like a description 
of modern life, and it explains why the 
Romans are so close to us. Cicero, Horace, 
Caesar, Antony, are moderns. But Alci- 
biades, Socrates, Pericles, and the rest take 
their stand in Greek fable. LikePisistratus, 
Solon, and Lycurgus, they melt into legend 
and belong to the realms of the imagination. 

No other people ever bore the same rela- 
tion to their arts that the Greeks bore; and 
in this lies their charm. When the Alexan- 
drine critics began to classify poetry and to 



GREEK GENIUS 

discuss perfection, they never even men- 
tioned the Roman poetry, although all of the 
greatest of it was in existence. Why is this ? 
It is because no Roman poem is a poem at 
all from the Greek point of view. It is too 
individual, too clever, and, generally, too 
political. Besides, it is not in Greek. The 
nearest modern analogy to the develop- 
ment of the whole Greek world of art is to 
be found in German contrapuntal music. 
No one except a German has ever written a 
true sonata or a symphony in the true poly- 
phonic German style. There are tours de 
force done by other nationalities, but the 
natural idiom of this music is Teutonic. 

I am not condemning the Latins or the 
moderns. Indeed, there is in Horace some- 
thing nobler and more humane than in all 
Olympus. The Greeks, moreover, seem in 
their civic incompetence like children when 
contrasted with the Romans or with the 
moderns. But in power of utterance, within 
their own crafts, the Greeks are unapproach- 
able. Let us now speak of matters of which 
we know very little. 

The statues on the Parthenon stand in a 
region where direct criticism cannot reach 
them, but which trigonometry ma}^, to some 
extent, determine. Their beauty probably 

n 128:1 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

results from an artistic knowledge so re- 
fined, a sophistication so exact, that, as we 
gaze, we lose the process and see only results. 
A Greek architect could have told you just 
what lines of analysis must be followed in 
order to get these effects in grouping and in 
relief. It is all, no doubt, built up out of 
tonic and dominant, but' the manual of 
counterpoint has been lost. As the tragic 
poet fills the stage with the legend, so the 
sculptor fills the metope with the legend. 
Both are closely following artistic usage: 
each is merely telling the old story with new 
refinement. And whether we gaze at the 
actors on the stage or at the figures in the 
metope, whether we study a lyric or listen to 
a dialogue, we are in communion with the 
same genius, the same legend. The thing 
which moves and delights us is a unity. 

This Genius is not hard to understand. 
Anyone can understand it. That is the 
proof of its greatness. As Boccaccio said of 
Dante, not learning but good wits are needed 
to appreciate him. One cannot safely look 
towards the mind of the modern scholar for 
an understanding of the Greek mind, because 
the modern scholar is a specialist, a thing 
the Greek abhors. If a scholar to-day knows 
the acoustics of the Greek stage, that is 



GREEK GENIUS 

thought to be a large enough province for 
him. He is not allowed to be an authority 
on the scenery. In the modern scholar's 
mind everything is in cubby-holes; and 
everybody to-day wants to become an au- 
thority. Everyone, moreover, is very se- 
rious to-day; and it does not do to be too 
serious about Greek things, because the very 
genius of Greece has in it a touch of irony 
which combines with our seriousness to 
make a heavy, indigestible paste. The Greek 
will always laugh at you if he can, and the 
only hope is to keep him at arm's length and 
deal with him in the spirit of social life, of 
the world, of the bean monde, and of large 
conversation. His chief merit is to stimu- 
late this spirit. The less we dogmatise about 
his works and ways, the freer will the world 
be of secondary, second-rate commentaries. 
The more we study his works and ways, the 
fuller will the world become of intellectual 
force. 

The Greek classics are a great help in 
tearing open those strong envelopes in which 
the cultivation of the w^orld is constantly 
getting glued up. They helped Europe to 
cut free from theocratic tyranny in the late 
Middle Ages. They held the Western 
world together after the fall of the Papacy. 



EURIPIDES AND GREEK GENIUS 

They gave us modern literature: indeed, if 
one considers all that comes from Greece, 
one can hardly imagine what the world 
would have been like without her. The 
lamps of Greek thought are still burning in 
marble and in letters. The complete little 
microcosm of that Greek society hangs for- 
ever in the great macrocosm of the moving 
world, and sheds rays which dissolve preju- 
dice, making men thoughtful, rational, and 
gay. The greatest intellects are ever the 
most powerfully affected by it; but no one 
escapes. Nor can the world ever lose this 
benign influence, which must, so far as phi- 
losophy can imagine, qualify human life for- 
ever. 



1:1313 



II 
SHAKESPEARE 



THE GREEK STAGE AND SHAKESPEARE 

THE classic stage and Shakespeare's 
theatre have, at first sight, nothing in 
common; for the first was dedicated to 
unity, the second to variety. The great size 
of the antique stage made unity essential. A 
play had but three or four characters and 
involved but one or two ideas, which were 
hammered upon during the entire perform- 
ance. When the heroes ceased speaking, the 
Chorus took up the thread of the argument. 
A Greek tragedy, moreover, was of national 
origin and of religious import. The plot 
was always taken from a familiar myth ; and 
only great personages, heroes, kings and 
princes, were allowed upon the stage. 

A play of Shakespeare's, on the other 
hand, was acted in a small space, and in- 
volved twenty or thirty characters. It took 
place amid hurried shif tings of scene (imag- 
inary scene, for there was next to no real 
scenery) . The plot was any story under the 



GREEK GENIUS 

sun. Tragedy and comedy were mixed. It 
had no public or religious significance. In 
fact, it was always on the verge of being 
taboo, and was constantly told by the 
police to move on. As for unity and the 
Unities, the fixed and stationary character 
of the staging itself was about the only unity 
in many Elizabethan plays. 

In spite of these vast differences between 
the Greek stage and Shakespeare's stage, 
there are certain resemblances between the 
greatest of Shakespeare's tragedies and the 
greatest Greek tragedies. There is, in a few 
of Shakespeare's plays, as in Othello and 
King Lear, a unity of theme, a single mov- 
ing column of idea, which makes them 
analogous to Greek plays, though all the 
machinery is different. Then the language 
of Shakespeare's loftiest tragic vein has 
many turns of thought and metaphor which 
are surprisingly like the Greek. Then, too, 
both theatres are intellectual, — that is to say, 
the appeal is an intellectual appeal, done 
through the presentation of ideas in the text, 
not through melodrama or pantomime. 
Every idea is articulated into words. If a 
person has a pain or sees someone coming he 
says : ''I have a pain," "I see someone com- 
ing." The thoughts and purposes of the 

1:136: 



SHAKESPEARE 

characters are thus metaphysically pre- 
sented, and are often expounded with a 
rhetorical power which the stage functions 
of the characters do not suggest. Both on 
the Greek and on the English stage each 
character has, as it were, the privilege of 
becoming the poet; and it is the unspoken 
convention that no one shall notice the excur- 
sion. There is a danger connected with this 
privilege ; for when the poet gets on his own 
hobby he is apt to make the little fishes talk 
like whales. For instance, it is natural that 
an old nurse should talk about death and the 
next world ; but it is not natural that an old 
nurse should betray the peculiar cast of 
thought of a philosophic scholar, which Eu- 
ripides throws over Phaedra's attendant. 
The old woman closes a philosophic speech 
as follows : "And so we show our mad love 
of this life because its light is shed on earth, 
and because we know no other, and have 
naught revealed to us of all our Earth may 
hide; and trusting to fables, we drift at ran- 
dom." 

So also Shakespeare, in As You Like It, 
suddenly endows Phoebe the shepherdess 
with a "discourse of reason" much resem- 
bling Hamlet's, because a subject has come 
up that interests the poet,— namely, the 
UZ7l 



GREEK GENIUS 

difference between physical injury and men- 
tal distress. 

"Lean but upon a rush," says Phoebe, 
"The cicatrice and capable impressure 

Thy palm some moment keeps, but now 
mine eyes. 

Which I have darted at thee, hurt thee 



It is the blank verse that gives the nurse 
and Phoebe this enlargement of their pow- 
ers. In fact, both Greek tragedy and 
Shakespearian tragedy are in their poetic 
march a sort of great Gargantuan discourse 
issuing from the mouth of the poet, the 
stage being his jaws. 

There is yet another resemblance between 
Shakespeare and the Greeks. Both the 
Greek tragedies and Shakespeare's best plays 
have been written with supreme facility. 
They have fallen from the pen. They exist 
in a region of artistic fulfilment. I suspect 
that it is this latter element of perfection 
that links Shakespeare and the Greeks in our 
thought, rather than all the rest of their 
scanty resemblances. So far as perfection 
of form goes, the Greek plays are infinitely 
superior to Shakespeare's. So far as native 
^38] 



SHAKESPEARE 

talent goes, there is no Greek dramatist who 
stands anywhere near Shakespeare, though 
Aristophanes suggests him. In each case 
perfection reaches a chmax. With the 
Greeks it is the perfection of massive racial 
power; with Shakespeare, the perfection of 
modern romantic sentiment. 



D393 



II 

Shakespeare's vehicle 

THE invention of the alphabet very soon 
turned all forms of articulate expres- 
sion into mere reading and writing. The 
first edition of Homer's poems, no doubt, 
threw the reciters out of work, and handed 
over the poems bound hand and foot to the 
literary fraternity, — to those men with ink- 
bottles and sheets of parchment who have 
owned and controlled the poems ever since. 
(Happy is the ordinary man if the scholars 
will give him but a peep at them !) To-day 
we have almost forgotten that Homer was 
originally intended for recitation, not for 
reading. The form in which we know the 
Iliad is due, thinks Professor Gilbert Mur- 
ray, to the demands of a reading public. In 
like manner, Shakespeare's plays have, dur- 
ing the last two hundred years, been kept 
upon the stage largely through the influence 
of the reading public. The world will un- 

D40 



GREEK GENIUS 

doubtedly continue to read the plays long 
after they have ceased to walk the boards. 

There is a great and terrible truth at the 
bottom of this outcome. Things are better 
understood, more rapidly and more vividly 
taken in, when they are read than when they 
are recited or acted; and though the rise of 
a great actor may now and then qualify this 
rule for a day, though Garrick or Edmund 
Kean or Salvini may show the true Shake- 
speare in a flash, the memory of which lasts 
for the hearer's lifetime, yet the mass of 
men must depend on the printed page for all 
their knowledge of Homer or of Shake- 
speare. We know Hamlet so well that it is 
only by an effort that we remember that 
Hamlet was once a play, a thing unfamiliar, 
a novelty in a theatre, where people sat and 
wondered and watched the actors. Shake- 
speare on the stage has been murdered by 
Shakespeare in the closet. The theatre of 
one's own mind is more interesting than any 
actual theatre, and our inward actors outdo 
all but the greatest tragedians and come- 
dians of the world. 

On the real stage things move too slowly. 

I am bored with every speech : the lines are 

too familiar. The theatre compels me to 

take in the text by linear measurement, and 

I1422 



SHAKESPEARE 

never to skip. I cannot turn the page or 
dwell upon a favourite passage. I am 
cramped and bullied and held in place. And, 
after all, what do I get in a theatre that 
cannot be got in the easy-chair, where all the 
actors become brilliant and the plot never 
lags? 

We need not wonder, then, that the liter- 
ary influences, the pen-and-ink, closet influ- 
ences of the world have controlled Homer 
and ^schylus, for we see that they control 
Shakespeare. There is hardly a student of 
the poet, there is hardly a commentator on 
him, who thinks of the stage once in a vol- 
ume; and worst of all,— most dreadful of 
all, — Shakespeare himself forgets the stage 
for hours together. He becomes so inward, 
so excited, so inwound in his own enchant- 
ments that much of his greatest thought is 
lost in the staging of it. He is more poet 
than dramatist. He is the victim and the 
archangel of pen and ink. 

Nevertheless, in reviewing Shakespeare 
one must go back to the Globe Theatre and 
to those other murky jars out of which the 
clouds issued that have filled the world. 
The little tumbledown barns where his plays 
were staged, and the ragged succession of 
scenes that constituted a drama in his day, 

1:1433 



GREEK GENIUS 

required variety and rapid handling. Shades 
of humour and of extravagance abound; 
parenthetical, non - dramatic, personal 
touches, things which come from nowhere 
and vanish. They abound because the au- 
dience is close to the actors and can enjoy 
them. The boards are flooded by a con- 
course of characters, comic and tragic. 
There is an interweaving of several plots, 
no division into acts, a swarming of hu- 
manity as at a fair, and generally no scenic 
interest, no piece montee at the end. A play 
ends where it ends, often with only two per- 
sons on the stage. Instead of the "features" 
of the classic stage, — I mean the well-under- 
stood, artistic members of a Greek play, as 
the recitations by messengers, dramatic 
dialogues, trochaic passages, etc., — we have 
improvised features of Shakespeare's own 
invention, bits of ornament thrown in as it 
strikes his fancy to use them; as, for in- 
stance, Jaques' ''Seven Ages," Mercutio's 
"Queen Mab," Hamlet's "Speech to the 
Players," Lorenzo's "On Such a Night as 
this." There are also ornamental character- 
isations, as, for instance, Queen Katherine's 
character of Wolsey, lago's satirical sketch 
of the "Perfect Woman,"— moral saws, and 
bits of description, sometimes raised through 



SHAKESPEARE 

the alchemy of inspiration into the greatest 
poetry in existence. All these things are 
flung and sowed along the path of the play 
and distract us into little unexpected palaces 
of happiness. 

The dramatic practices of Shakespeare 
and of his contemporaries can hardly be 
called a school of drama. What other man 
except Shakespeare could succeed in his 
method of play-writing? It is the Eliza- 
bethan method; but there was only one 
Elizabethan who could write thus and be 
readable or actable. The rest of them have 
been dragged into nineteenth-century notice 
by the archaeologists of literature, but are 
about to fall back into the limbo where they 
belong. It is all a personal charm, this 
charm of Shakespeare's, and criticism can 
no more reach the essence of it than we can 
define the smell of a rose. It is in each 
phrase that the mystery lies. The poet him- 
self was unconscious and indifferent as to 
the whole phenomenon of his talent; and 
we are likelier to reach him if we follow him 
in this very indifference than if we attempt 
an analysis. The Greeks were critics by 
nature, and we may sauce them with their 
own polite learning without fear of becom- 
ing ridiculous; but the academic person has 

Cms] 



GREEK GENIUS 

never been quite able to get Shakespeare into 
his palazzo. He tries to introduce the poet 
through the front portico; but the columns 
are too close together. Then he leads him 
round to the back, takes down part of the 
wall, and so leaves our poet in the back 
yard, not omitting, -however, to put up a 
fine inscription about him in the rotunda. 
The truth is that the philosophical machinery 
of Learning does not help us here. We are 
more apt to take a good observation of 
Shakespeare by lying in the grass and mak- 
ing a guess than by erecting a telescope. As 
to Shakespeare's art and his technique, the 
critics have been at work over them for a 
hundred years, and have found him to be a 
master of the craft of his own kind of stage, 
whenever he chose to be such. We need not 
dispute this : it is a small part of the subject. 
Nevertheless, Shakespeare's stage technique 
is as experimental as the rest of his work. 
He has no system, but only habits ; and these 
habits hang so loosely on him that very often 
he forgets where he is, and does something 
unexpected. 

The plays were certainly meant for rapid 
presentation. It is impossible to recite 
Hamlet's advice to the players in an ordi- 
nary modern theatre without violating every 



SHAKESPEARE 

injunction of the poet as to proper diction 
and delivery. If you follow Hamlet's in- 
junctions, the speech will not be heard or 
understood by a third of your modern au- 
dience. King Lear cannot be staged— it is 
too long— unless the actors crowd on and 
off the boards like the characters in the 
greenroom of a circus. No one of us has 
ever seen a Shakespeare play given as it 
ought to be given ; for traditional acting has 
put intention into everything; pauses, elocu- 
tion and eye-work are de rigueur; the vanity 
of a dozen generations of actors has trained 
the public to expect, not a play, but selected 
scenes from Shakespeare, well dressed up 
and painstakingly interpreted. 

The forte of the small theatre is that it 
can make passing allusions to vivid personal 
traits. Shakespeare's plays are full of char- 
acters that remind us of Teniers and of 
Rembrandt. It is a stage where fleeting 
imaginative impressions chase one another, 
and nothing is monumental. It is like the 
internal stage of the mind. It is, in fact, the 
stage of Shakespeare's own mind, almost 
unsubdued to reality, unvisited by the stage 
carpenter. This is the most internal writing 
ever done, this writing of Shakespeare's ; it 
is like the writing of a man in a dream. The 
1^472 



GREEK GENIUS 

critics since Coleridge have found "inten- 
tion" and "judgment" and "calculation" of 
all sorts in Shakespeare; and Professor A. 
C. Bradley finds that the intricacies of logic 
and motive in Othello have been studied and 
thought out. Ah, no ! they have never been 
studied ; they have been improvised with the 
lightning (and sometimes with the thunder 
and lightning) of genius; but it is all im- 
provisation, it is the making of a charade 
for a night's phantasy. The great charm of 
it all comes from Shakespeare's self, and 
cannot be reduced to dramatic elements. 

The great power of Shakespeare is that he 
loves his characters. This is the persistent 
force that holds us. No creator has ever 
loved his creatures so much as Shakespeare 
has loved these characters. This is the cable 
that draws us. Next to this, and perhaps co- 
equal with it in power, is the hidden chain of 
contemplation that runs invisible and courses 
at the back of each play. One of the great- 
est thinkers that ever lived is in action. He 
does not know that he is thinking; he is 
merely recording thoughts that arise in him. 
On these two threads of a continuous 
benevolence and a consecutive course of 
thought Shakespeare hangs one dramatic 
device after another, so various and so bril- 



SHAKESPEARE 

liant that we have the drama, as it were, 
thrown in; we have flashes and abysses of 
drama,— more than we bargained for. 
Shakespeare is a dramatist, fifty kinds of a 
dramatist all at once ; but the drama is only 
a small part of Shakespeare's mind. 

There is one light in which Shakespeare is 
unique : he is gay. He is the only great poet 
who is gay ; for Homer and Dante are som- 
bre. Pure happiness is the rarest thing in 
poetry. You may search the collections of 
excerpts not quite in vain for a verse here 
and there that is not sad; but poetic senti- 
ment is traditionally and habitually gloomy. 
Yet open Shakespeare, and you almost al- 
ways open upon redundant, shining happi- 
ness. 

Perhaps in studying the Shakespearian 
drama one ought to begin with the chronicle- 
plays ; for this was where Shakespeare him- 
self began. A cycle of historic dramas was 
in existence before Shakespeare appeared. 
The old chronicle-play is a key to what the 
Elizabethan public expected and enjoyed. 
The interest in the whole lay in the staging 
of certain familiar heroes and kings, who 
are engaged in picturesque, martial and 
political imbroglios. It was a Homeric sort 
of appeal that drew people to these shows^ 



GREEK GENIUS 

Talbot and Joan of Arc and the procession 
of old English kings were images in the 
public mind. 

In the process of making this old drama 
more interesting, Shakespeare made it more 
coherent. It was a decorative, popular, 
moving panorama of bombast, into which 
he threw every kind of genius. If you take 
his series of historical plays, from Henry 
VI, through King John, Richard II, Rich- 
'^rd III, Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry 
VIII, they seem like a splendid set of 
tapestries. The later plays are more dra- 
matically articulated, and much more bril- 
liant in every way, than the earlier ones ; yet 
their appeal remains plastic or Homeric 
rather than dramatic. The fate-motive 
which flickers in and out among the his- 
torical plays was dealt with lightly, except 
in Richard HI, where it took the centre of 
the stage and gave to that play its early and 
enduring popularity. On the whole, how- 
ever, we must think of the single scene as 
the dramatic unit in this kind of drama. 
Each play strives to stage a set of stirring 
episodes rather than a story. The play- 
wright presents street fights, small proces- 
sions, alarums, people carried on the stage 
in arm-chairs to die (the first inventor of 



SHAKESPEARE 

this feature must have made a hit!), 
proclamations, defiances, magniloquent dec- 
lamations, cursings, boastings, tumults, and 
any excuse for a rumpus on the stage. All 
this is the raw material out of which Shake- 
speare evolved his art. 

If you read a few of the stage directions 
in Henry VI, they will give the milieu of the 
old chronicle-play : 



"The Same Before the Gates. Skirmish- 
ings. Talbot pursues the Dauphin, drives 
him in, and exit ; then enter Joan La Pucelle, 
driving Englishmen before her, and exit 
after them. Then re-enter Talbot." Again : 
''Enter Talbot, Bedford, Burgundy and 
Forces, with scaling-ladders, their drums 
beating a dead march." Again: "The 
P>ench leap over the walls in their shirts," 
etc. 



The rapidity of Shakespeare's develop- 
ment is the startling part of him. For if 
Henry VI is Giotto, Henry IV is Michelan- 
gelo and Paul Veronese. The immense 
license of the Elizabethan stage was what 
Shakespeare needed ; and out of it he grew, 
unchastened, unconscious of boundary or 
law, ever pursuing his latest thought. The 



GREEK GENIUS 

power that descended upon him was a power 
of coherent excitement, which came and 
went at its own will. He seems not to have 
known the difference between wTiting with 
inspiration and writing without inspiration. 
Other poets have lived in a like ignorance of 
their own moods. Wordsworth, for in- 
stance, passed from divinity to dulness with- 
out being aware of it. The difference be- 
tween the two men is that Wordsworth 
believed that all he wrote was inspired; 
whereas Shakespeare apparently regarded 
all his own compositions as a harmless kind 
of rubbish. 

In Shakespeare's case the poet was subject 
to so many kinds of inspiration that when 
one stopped, another was apt to begin; and 
we ourselves who read him are whirled away 
with the new force, not knowing where we 
are or how we are being dealt wdth. In the 
play of King John the story proceeds at a 
jog-trot till the scene in which King John 
instructs Hubert to kill little Prince Arthur. 
Here for one moment there falls on the 
scene an immense seriousness, like a blast 
out of Macbeth: 

King. Thou art his keeper. 

Hubert. And I'll keep him so. 



SHAKESPEARE 

That he shall not offend your majesty. 
King. Death. 

Hubert. My lord. 
King. A grave. 

Hubert. He shall not live. 

King. Enough. 

I could be merry now. Hubert, I love 

thee; 
Well, ril not say what I intend for thee : 
Remember. (To the Queen.) Madam, 

fare you well : 
I'll send those powers o'er to your 
majesty. 

Again, in the same play, there is a sort of 
divine beauty in the scene between Hubert 
and little Arthur; and this in spite of the 
fact that little Arthur is a monster, not like 
a boy in the least, and talks as no boy ever 
talked. While Shakespeare was writing the 
historical plays his talent developed rapidly, 
spontaneously, and in all directions at once. 
He found himself among hurricanes, and 
he let them blow ; among zephyrs, and he let 
them breathe or die at their will. This was 
ever his way. 

In the third act of Hamlet a dramatic 
gust dies out as mysteriously as the strange 
blast of feeling arises about the little boy in 



GREEK GENIUS 

King John. From the opening of the play, 
down to the scene between Hamlet and his 
mother, we are in the atmosphere of the 
greatest kind of drama. It is a fate-drama, 
as powerful as the Agamemnon of ^schy- 
Itis. Our souls are shaken with its reality. 
This religious interest comes to its climax 
in Hamlet's sudden vision of the spectre 
which his mother cannot see. The woman, 
whose whole heart has been torn to shreds 
by her son's reproaches, now for a moment 
forgets everything except her terror in the 
discovery that Hamlet is really mad. This 
is a climax out of the supernatural into the 
natural, such as no one except Shakespeare 
was ever capable of. The scene is as great 
as anything in human literature. Then 
Shakespeare gets tired of the Ghost. He 
leaves the poor Ghost and his whole story 
behind, drops it as a dog drops a bone that 
he has wearied of, and goes gambolling 
upon the horizon. From this point onward 
Shakespeare holds the play together with 
grave-diggers, brilliant soliloquies, young 
men in frenzy of passion who com.e to grips 
over a girl's bier, duels, murders, and a dead 
march. These latter scenes, however, which 
are hustled on to the stage, half dressed, to 
piece out the performance, are as magical as 

1:1543 



SHAKESPEARE 

the earlier parts of the drama. No wonder 
they made Shakespeare forget the Ghost. 
OpheHa, with her scraps of lyric phrase 
which have the power of Sappho at the back 
of them, moves upon our gaze. We receive 
dreadful gleams from the mystery behind all 
life, — fragments of thought, where the pas- 
sion of forty Dantes is put into accidents of 
phrase. No wonder the Ghost and the whole 
plot and scheme of the play were withdrawn 
from Shakespeare's mind. He winds all 
tip with a thoroughgoing Elizabethan hurly- 
burly. The main interest, it must be con- 
fessed, is never recovered. By the time the 
curtain falls in Hamlet the characters have 
become marionettes. They lie about the 
stage, and one hardly knows which is the 
king. 

All this finale of Hamlet is very inartistic. 
It certainly would have been easy at least to 
introduce the Ghost for a last triumphant, 
sorrowing, magnificent speech over the dead 
bodies; and this would have tended to pull 
the play together. But the Ghost is as far 
from Shakespeare's mind as Helen of 
Troy, and is almost as completely banished 
from the action. What is it, then, that 
keeps the audience in the theatre during the 
last act of Hamlet ? Perhaps it is something 

Dss: 



GREEK GENIUS 

that cannot be stated or even be clearly imag- 
ined. Yet through it is conveyed the opera- 
tion of gigantic Mind, which flashes from 
Shakespeare as he thinks and dreams and 
proceeds in his extraordinary journey 
through the play. It would seem as if all 
the lighting and staging and arrangements 
that we have been taught to consider as the 
essentials of dramatic art are not needed; 
for Shakespeare produces the most profound 
effects without any of them. We cannot 
find his vehicle. We are left standing on 
the edge of the abyss, not knowing how we 
came there, or we are lulled in the music of 
Elysium, not knowing why it sounds. 



056-2 



T 



III 

EACH PLAY A WORLD 

HERE is a world in each of Shake- 
speare's pldiys, — the world, I should 
say,— so felt and so seen as the world never 
was seen before nor could be felt and seen 
again, even by Shakespeare. Each play is a 
little local universe. His stage devices he 
repeats, but the atmosphere of a play is 
never repeated. Twelfth Night, As You 
Like It, and The Merchant of Venice are 
very unlike one another. The unity that is 
in each of them results from unimaginable 
depths of internal harmony in each. The 
group of persons in any play (I am speak- 
ing of the good plays) forms the unity; for 
the characters are psychologically inter- 
locked with one another. Prospero implies 
Caliban ; Toby Belch implies Malvolio ; Shy- 
lock, Antonio. The effects of all imagina- 
tive art result from subtle implications and 
adjustments. The public recognises these 
things as beauty, but cannot analyse them. 

1:1573 



GREEK GENIUS 

To the artist, however, they have been the 
bricks and mortar out of which the work 
was builded. We feel, for instance, in the 
Midsummer-Nigh fs Dream, that the fairies 
are somehow correlative to the artisans. 
They are made out of a complementary 
chemical. On the other hand, Theseus and 
Demetrius and Hippolyta, in the same play, 
are lay figures which set off as with a foil 
both the fairies and the artisans. Theseus, 
Hippolyta, and Demetrius are marionettes 
which give intellect and importance to Bot- 
tom and Flute, and lend body and life to the 
tiny fairies. All this miraculous subtlety of 
understanding on Shakespeare's part is un- 
conscious. He has had no recipe, no metier. 
The colouring of each play, its humour, 
its mood, is Shakespeare's mood as he wrote 
the play. The mood of desperate philosophic 
questioning in which he wrote Hamlet gives 
to the play its only unity. So Macbeth and 
King Lear are each beclouded by its own 
kind of passionate speculation. The story is, 
in each case, a mere thread to catch the crys- 
tals from an overcharged atmosphere of 
feeling. The tragedy of Lear is loftier, 
more abstract in thought, and at the same 
time more hotly human in feeling than Mac- 
beth. It is in these worlds of mood that we 

i: 158:1 



SHAKESPEARE 

must seek Shakespeare, and we must remain 
somewhat moody and dreamy ourselves dur- 
ing the search. If we take a pair of tongs 
to catch him, he will elude us. 

In Othello, Shakespeare seems to have 
become interested in working out the de- 
struction of a noble soul by means of a stage 
demon, a sort of Richard III in private life 
and without ambition. lago has no motive, 
and Othello has no weakness ; and the con- 
junction of the two persons is artificial. The 
idea is, nevertheless, elaborated with diabol- 
ical cunning on the playwright's part, and 
the picture of Othello remains the best pic- 
ture of jealousy in literature; so that the 
play belongs at the head of all problem plays. 
If considered seriously, Othello is a plea for 
evil ; but, properly taken, it is a sort of awful 
jeu d'esprit. An odious play it is, false to 
life and without overtones. Yet so gigantic 
is the mind that became interested in this 
odious problem, and so thoroughly equipped 
in play-writing, that the world, after three 
centuries, goes on being deceived and fas- 
cinated by the story. Shakespeare's interest 
in the play is a playwright's interest ; and he 
happens not to weary of the problem or to 
stray from his main theme during the whole 
course of the story. Othello is like a Greek 



GREEK GENIUS 

tragedy in that it is a masterpiece of artificial 
logic with a bad ending. But, of course, 
Othello is extremely unlike the Greek from 
every other point of view; as, for instance, 
it has many characters, a complexity of plot, 
a shifting of scene, a very hard and non- 
lyrical treatment, and endless Elizabethan 
hurly-burly. We must never forget that the 
radical difference between ancient and mod- 
ern drama is that modern drama is always 
unfolding a story. We are kept wondering 
how the thing will turn out. Ancient drama, 
on the contrary, takes the plot for granted 
and focuses our whole attention upon the 
treatment. 

The unexampled spontaneousness of 
Shakespeare is due to the flame of his own 
curiosity, that hums like a great fire through 
his plays, which are plays only incidentally, 
— they are really studies, the memorandum 
books of a man who is thinking, — water- 
colour sketches made by an amateur for his 
own pleasure, and then filed away never to 
be examined again. Shakespeare has lived 
in them as he wrote them; he knows not 
their limits ; he has no intentions, no subse- 
quent curiosity. In spite of their stage 
merits, they lose by being acted, as things 
delicate lose by being placarded. Compared 

Deo] 



SHAKESPEARE 

to Moliere's plays, they show imperfection 
everywhere. But there is so much genius in 
them,— as much, perhaps, as there is in the 
rest of Hterature outside of them,— that they 
belong to a superhuman world. No one ever 
wrote like this before. It is a new vehicle. 
There exists nothing with which to compare 
it. There was a good deal of truth in the 
early view which regarded Shakespeare as a 
gifted savage. He does not make the com- 
promises or play the game of stage art. But 
he is following law of some sort, or he could 
not have become so popular. In multifarious 
appeal he has no fellow. The child loves 
his wit, the youth his passion, the middle- 
aged person his knowledge of the world, the 
old man his metaphysical power, and all men 
his benevolence. 

What is a play ? I do not know ; but I am 
sure that these things are much more than 
plays : to me they are metaphysical treatises. 
There never was a creature like Hamlet, and 
never can be : Hamlet is a philosophical gim- 
crack. He shows the mind of an elderly 
man set upon the shoulders of a boy of eigh- 
teen, and turned loose in a tragic situation. 
What a monstrous apparatus of thought is 
here set up! There never was a man like 
Macbeth, and there never can be. An over- 

ri6o 



GREEK GENIUS 

sensitive, morbid, middle-aged recluse com- 
mits a brutal murder in a barbarous Scotch 
castle, and then gives himself the horrors 
by plunging about in his double character of 
bloody borderer and lyric hypochondriac. 
Men are not like that. There never was a 
man like Richard III, or indeed like any 
other complete stage villain. The stage vil- 
lain is a comparatively low form of artificial 
device. He is a metaphysical hypothesis, 
like the rest, invented for purposes of dem- 
onstration. 

Perhaps we ought, in dealing with this 
whole subject, to begin by regarding all 
stage-land, from wheels and pulleys to poetic 
metaphors, as a congeries of things that are 
essentially and necessarily false and make- 
believe,— elaborately constructed things, 
which, properly used, flash a momentary il- 
lusion of truth into the sympathetic eye, but 
which will not stand inspection, — no, not 
for a moment. The people who write essays 
on Shakespeare's characters, treating them 
as real, have found a pretty amusement, 
which is about as valuable as the literary 
pastime of writing imaginary conversations 
between famous dead people. A stage char- 
acter is always merely the fragment of a 
picture. Perhaps only a profile is shown; 

1:1623 



SHAKESPEARE 

and yet its duty is done then and there. No 
more than this profile of the man ever ex- 
isted, and we can never know what a full 
view of the face might reveal. If we add 
to Shakespeare's sketch by tacking on a bit 
of our own imagination, we shall produce a 
strange rag doll, just as the writers of imag- 
inary conversations produce strange rag 
dolls. 

When we come to King Lear we are in 
deep waters. In this play the passion and 
the tragedy develop so naturally, so unex- 
pectedly, and so suddenly out of the halcyon 
opening of the drama that we are taken 
unaware. The clouds gather and the light- 
ning plays about, and, lo! we are in the 
heights and depths of human experience. 
But how did we get there? What element 
has done this, and what does it all mean? 
Shakespeare neither knew nor cared. Hid- 
den within King Lear, as in Hamlet, is a 
terrific metaphysical apparatus, a psychom- 
eter or dynamo of passion. It sets the 
machinery of our hearts in motion. The 
thing has been inserted into our minds and 
works its own will upon us. The comment, 
or chorus work, which in Hamlet and in 
Macbeth is done by the protagonists them- 
selves, is in King Lear distributed to a 

1:163: 



GREEK GENIUS 

jester, a pretended madman and a friend in 
disguise. Lear himself is not a double con- 
sciousness like Hamlet or Macbeth, but a 
passionate, feeble-minded, ignorant old man, 
who becomes pathetic chiefly through his 
age. But why is this pathos so deep ? And 
why do the little dogs, Tray, Blanche, and 
Sweetheart, move us so profoundly? I sup- 
pose that Shakespeare himself has been 
greatly moved as he lived through the scenes 
in all these plays. He has not known just 
why the plots worked out as they did. He 
was evidently experimenting, and found that 
his themes worked up to these climaxes 
automatically. In Timon of Athens he wor- 
ries and rages, yet nothing will come of it. 
In Coriolanus he works like a Trojan, and is 
as dull as Corneille. 

If Shakespeare had only been an artist 
like Leonardo, v/ho was always calculating 
effects and analysing causes, we might know 
something of his art. But the fact is that 
he knew nothing about the matter himself, 
and does not aid us. He does not know 
what has happened. Let us take an illustra- 
tion of his ingenuousness. He reads Mon- 
taigne's essay on Sebondus,— that great, 
long, impassioned essay, in which Mon- 
taigne demonstrates the impotency of man. 



SHAKESPEARE 

his inability to know anything whatever, his 
helplessness, and the absurdity of all human 
pretence to intellect. It is Essay No. XII 
in the Second Book, and we can all follow 
in, Ev^eryman's Library the very text which 
Shakespeare pondered. Shakespeare read 
this essay with a devouring curiosity, and ab- 
sorbed its ideas,— which, after all, are ideas 
that are never long absent from any thought- 
ful mind. The ''Que sgai-je?" of Mon- 
taigne might be Shakespeare's own motto, 
were not Shakespeare too profoundly un- 
conscious to have any motto. He reads 
Montaigne, and for a time he becomes Mon- 
taigne. For a time he sees the whole uni- 
verse from the point of view of the sceptic; 
and while this influence is upon him he 
becomes interested in refurbishing the old 
stock play of Hamlet. Before he is aware, 
he has begun to use Hamlet as a stalking- 
horse for Montaigne's philosophy. He does 
not invent Hamlet as Goethe invents Mephis- 
topheles. Hamlet is merely the result of 
the different problems and occupations of 
Shakespeare's private mind. Shakespeare's 
primary interest is an interest in life, not an 
interest in play-writing or in philosophy; 
these things are subsidiary toys, algebraical 
signs, to him. And when, as in Hamlet, it 



GREEK GENIUS 

turns out that the playwright has made a 
monster, he never stops to consider the mat- 
ter. For Shakespeare does not know that 
his own talent is a talent for thinking, that 
his own chief interest lies in speculation. 
He thinks he is telling a story, and he be- 
lieves that all these ideas are in the story: 
he sees them in the tale itself. 

There are writers who write for them- 
selves. They have a curiosity, they have a 
passion for study and for statement, and a 
joy in the process of writing. Their writ- 
ings are personal memoirs. Saint-Simon 
and Samuel Pepys are men of genius by 
reason of the passionate interest they take in 
their themes. They give us the very heart 
of a man on every page. Writing is to them 
the same thing as living. It is articulate 
living. Now, curiously enough, Shakespeare 
belongs to this class of writers. While using 
a most abstract and impersonal vehicle, he 
became early in life so interested in his 
themes that his personal mind was absorbed 
into his work, and his personal experiences 
and reflections were at the disposal of his 
artistic requirements. The vehicle which he 
used is ostensibly an abstract vehicle, perhaps 
the most abstract literary form that exists; 
for the author of a plav has apparently no 

ni66':] 



SHAKESPEARE 

voice at all. And yet Shakespeare expressed 
his most intimate personal experiences with 
such fluency that you might say his vehicle 
rules him. As the man in the street rumi- 
nates and is greatly at the mercy of accident 
for the turn in his thought, so Shakespeare. 
His theme runs away with him in the good 
plays, and refuses to run away with him in 
the bad plays. He has so many different 
planes of brilliancy that he can ''pull off," as 
they say, almost anything; but he is never 
aiming at anything in particular when he 
begins. For instance, in the Taming of the 
Shrew he has on the background of his can- 
vas a superficial old Italian comedy of man- 
ners and of horse-play. He botches a 
boisterous, amusing and not beautiful play 
out of it. How coarse is his brush here! 
The subject has amused him and excited his 
wit; but iirst-rate comedy cannot be made 
out of this material,— at least, so it seems. 
In Romeo and Julie f, Shakespeare's enor- 
mous romanticism is excited, as it is in An- 
tony and Cleopatra. The subject enchants 
him. There is a dream quality in all he 
writes here which is at the bottom of the 
popularity of these plays. But he is still at 
the mercy of his dream. In Julius CcBsar 
the interest of the play fails after the assas- 

1:1673 



GREEK GENIUS 

sination ; the drama breaks in two. Why did 
not Shakespeare use the assassination as a 
chmax, and so save this play? Because his 
old training in chronicle-plays suggested an- 
other course. When Shakespeare sits down 
to write a play about Julius Caesar, he seizes 
North's Plutarch in his left hand and begins 
to write immediately. He is not thinking of 
how to make a drama. He is thinking about 
the man Caesar and his history. And some 
French writer, whose name I forget, has 
said that the few words spoken by Csesar in 
this play give the best picture of Caesar that 
exists. In Winter's Tale the whole action 
is broken in two by one of those twenty- 
years-after, dismal arrangements which are 
so hard to listen to; but Shakespeare's own 
romantic feeling saves the play. It is saved 
by Shakespeare's personal charm, by his 
love of Perdita and of the pastoral scenes, 
by his passionate sentiment for Hermione 
and the reconciliation, by his enjoyment of 
Paulina and the baby. What Shakespeare 
does is always makeshift, — or rather inspira- 
tion. Thus, Winter's Tale, which begins 
coldly and in one of his worst manners, 
turns, through the turn of the plot, and quite 
unconsciously to the poet, into a fervent 
palinode in praise of conjugal love. It is 

ni683 



SHAKESPEARE 

shot through with personal emotion, and 
drips with the dews of dawn. Some people 
can hardly bear the excessive sentiment of 
Winter's Tale; and I confess that the recon- 
veyance of Hermione to the breast of Leon- 
tes taxes my powers of consumption. But 
Shakespeare himself revelled in this. Shake- 
speare had, indeed, a school-girl side, the 
side that delights in keepsakes, in twin cher- 
ries, in long-treasured, innocent, early, pas- 
sionate thoughts of happiness. The intensity 
of his feeling increases with the innocence 
of the matter in hand. This virginity of 
feeling, which gave us Cordelia and Des- 
demona, Ophelia and Miranda, governs the 
climax of Winter's Tale. 

It has become customary to say that we 
know nothing of Shakespeare the man. But 
indeed we know his mind more intimately 
than we know the mind of any other historic 
person. The man himself we know : it is his 
method that defies our comprehension. His 
method is not an intellectual thing at all, and 
has never been reduced to a shape in which 
it can be studied. His method is a part of 
his digestion and of his daily life. The 
thing he laid his hand to he transmutes. At 
an earlier or later period of his life. King 
Lear would have turned under his hands 

1:1693 



GREEK GENIUS 

into a rural comedy, or into a golden drama, 
like The Merchant of Venice. 

Power in expression arises out of artistic 
unity, whether in comedy or tragedy ; and in 
Shakespeare's good plays the whole volume 
of the drama rolls along in its own envelope, 
and with a natural flow like a tide of the 
ocean. Every word and metaphor, every 
character and incident, is drenched in a par- 
ticular tint and cloud-colour. The whole 
thing is like a solid body, so unitary is its 
complexity; and as it rolls it invades our 
minds with the force of nature— our own 
nature. The law of its behaviour suits our 
mind so exactly that the fable seems to be a 
part of ourselves : a child can understand it. 
This can be said of Shakespeare only at his 
easiest and best, for there is also a Shake- 
speare who lumbers and jolts about, poses, 
makes bad jokes, breaks off in the middle, is 
obscene and contradictory, dull and horrid. 
For Shakespeare was the most careless 
writer that ever lived, and it is this careless- 
ness which left him so open to the whisper- 
ings of the Muse. 

Even the bad plays have individuality; 
each has a psychological character of its 
own; they do not resemble one another in 
spirit. And the Shakespeare who moves in 

1:170 J 



SHAKESPEARE 

and out of the bad plays, appearing and dis- 
appearing like a silent scene-shifter who is 
not meant to be observed, resembles the 
Shakespeare of the great plays in the length 
of his stride. He is not always radiant or at 
home in the play. He is often queer, sour, 
and low-minded, like a sick man. We recog- 
nise his mind, however, through its preoccu- 
pation with abstract thoughts expressed in 
dazzling, concrete images. 



i:i70 



IV 

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 

THERE is a history of criticism which 
will go on forever, and Shakespeare's 
relation to it is indubitably very important. 
But Shakespeare's direct influence upon the 
great body of men who know nothing about 
this whole branch of learning is what makes 
him Shakespeare. The Gospels are not en- 
crusted in theology, because biblical criticism 
has never adhered to the New Testament. 
So literary and dramatic criticism do not 
stick to Shakespeare. There is some sort of 
vis major behind the Gospels, and there is a 
vis major behind much of Shakespeare 
which nothing touches. This power draws 
and fascinates the scholar; it chains him to 
his desk and to his thesis; it does not, as a 
rule, liberate his intellect. The scholar 
whose imagination is alive is a rarity. In- 
deed, scholarship proverbially kills the imag- 
ination; and therefore in striving to find 
what is our own in Shakespeare— who is the 

Lm2 



GREEK GENIUS 

greatest storehouse of imagination in the 
world — we should be indifferent to scholar- 
ship. Everyone of us has a personal share 
in this w^ealth, a special relation to this 
mountainous loadstone of attracting intel- 
lect. No matter what we find, we cannot 
carry it away, nor can we ever force anyone 
else to perceive and value our discovery ex- 
actly as we do. 

Coleridge discovered two different Shake- 
speares in All's Well that Ends Well This 
is the right spirit in which to read Shake- 
speare,— this free-handed plundering of his 
meanings. We should read Shakespeare for 
pleasure, and only for pleasure. The plays 
were meant to be gay trifles, the perfume 
and the suppliance of a minute. Music and 
painting and poetry yield up their meanings 
in flashes and by accident; and just here is 
where the critics go mad : for they think to 
bore into the meaning of poetry as a mouse 
bores into a cheese. A man who sits down 
to read The Tempest for six months at a 
stretch is sure to make some discovery about 
the play. The professional scholars who 
attack ancient poetry and lost religions in 
this spirit of conquest are always rewarded : 
they find something. They develop a hobby, 
a thesis, an idee fixe. They become inter- 



SHAKESPEARE 

ested in a discovery of some sort; and the 
life of the subject closes its portals. 

So, then, let us be unscholarly, careless, 
and above all let us take no stock in our own 
discoveries, but regard the world as Dream 
Stuff, while we examine the extremely un- 
pleasant play of Troilus and Cressida, — a 
play that can never have been good; for it 
has no humour, no dramatic force, no sus- 
tained beauty. It has neither action nor 
plot, neither wit nor intention ; and it is per- 
vaded by a low moral tone. It is, indeed, a 
horrid jumble of distasteful impressions. 
And yet the play is intimately and con- 
vincingly Shakespeare's own. My reason 
for taking it up is that we seem to find in it 
broken bits of Shakespeare's art, botches and 
scraps of him, often so crudely done as to 
lay bare the artist's intention without accom- 
plishing his end. By studying these stray 
passages we seem to get some insight into 
the way the poet's mind worked. 

Troilus and Cressida is supposed to con- 
cern the Trojan War ; but no war seems to 
be in progress in it. Certain characters, or 
caricatures, w^ander on and off the stage, or 
offend us by their different breaches of taste. 
The dressing up of the Homeric heroes in 
Elizabethan costume produces burlesque. 

1:175: 



GREEK GENIUS 

The principal characters suggest the oper- 
etta, and the minor ones the music-hall. 
Ajax appears as a sort of Bardolph or 
Pistol ; Pandarus as an Andrew Aguecheek ; 
Thersites as a Shakespearian clown— ^.^._, 
Launcelot Gobbo, Autolycus. Helen is ad- 
dressed by Paris as *'Nell." Ulysses walks 
upon the stage reading a letter. Hector, in 
speaking to Menelaus, refers to Helen as 
"your quondam wife," to which Menelaus 
replies, "Name her not now, sir; she's a 
deadly theme." "O pardon, I offend," says 
Hector. We find it hard to credit Shake- 
speare with the worst parts of the dialogue ; 
but the man who adopted and republished 
the lines is almost as much a reprobate as the 
man who wrote them. 

There are many speeches in the play that 
no one but Shakespeare could have written, 
—not a juvenile Shakespeare, either, but the 
Shakespeare of King Lear and Macbeth, the 
full-grown, miracle-minded man. These 
good things detach themselves like new paint 
from an old canvas ; but the canvas is cov- 
ered with truly Shakespearian work,— only 
bad, unpleasant work,— so that some schol- 
ars have supposed that Troilus and Cressida 
was a youthful piece worked over by the 
mature artist. Whether the play be old or 

1:176:1 



SHAKESPEARE 

new, and whether the kernel of it be Shake- 
speare's own or another's, we can observe in 
it the working of Shakespeare's intelligence. 
Not only is the awakened great genius there, 
but the deboshed penny-a-liner is there also, 
all through the play. Besides these two 
men there is, here and there, a half- 
awakened Shakespeare, a boozy, indifferent 
Orpheus, who gropes past his thought and 
lunges on, sometimes swinging out a phrase 
like a wreath of roses and then again heav- 
ing a brick. All the beauties in the play are 
detached and scrappy things. That Shake- 
speare took no coherent interest in the story 
whenever he wrote it, or wrote at it,— of 
this we feel sure. 

The play opens with a couple of scenes in 
the pot-house vein between Pandarus, Troi- 
lus, and Cressida; and then the Grecian 
leaders come on with a few long speeches in 
Shakespeare's most magnificent rhetoric, 
larded with his most personal and peculiar 
faults. Indeed, in this play most of his bold 
misuses of language are infelicitous. But 
the wreaths of roses are there also. As to 
the meaning of the play, we should gather 
from the long opening speeches that the plot 
was to have something to do with the perils 

1:1773 



GREEK GENIUS 

of a divided authority; for this idea is given 
out by Agamemnon and then expanded and 
worked up by Ulysses in two speeches, of 
which the first is didactic and stately, some- 
what like Portia's on the quality of mercy, 
and the second is a description, in a vein to 
make Homer weep, of the buffoonery prac- 
tised in the tent of Achilles. The perils of a 
divided authority provide a philosophic 
theme on which the profound psychologist 
Shakespeare has reflected much, and the 
poetry comes boiling out of him as from a 
spring. Then it stops. 

Thersites, the most degraded and most 
monstrous of Shakespeare's clowns, is now 
given his whack at the audience, and Ajax 
is presented as the stupid man. Then fol- 
lows a family scene between Hector, Troilus, 
and Priam, in which the merits of the war 
are discussed. Hector happens to remark 
of Helen : *'She is not worth what she doth 
cost the holding." This awakens, or half 
awakens, the sleeping philosopher in Shake- 
speare, and he gropes in his dream for his 
favourite thought: "There's nothing good 
or bad but thinking makes it so." This 
thought always swims in deep waters ; it is a 
most difficult thought to express, as the 



SHAKESPEARE 

Pragmatists have recently found; and 
Shakespeare's deHvery of it upon the pres- 
ent occasion is so clumsy that we hardly 
know where he stands on the argument. 

Troilus. What is aught but as 'tis valued ? 

Hector. But value dwells not in particular 
will; 
It holds his estimate and dignity 
As well wherein 'tis precious of itself 
As in the prizer. 'Tis mad idolatry 
To make the service greater than the god, 
And the will dotes that is inclinable 
To what infectiously itself affects, 
Without some image of the affected merit. 

Here, as so often in Shakespeare, every- 
thing both on and off the stage is held up 
while the master talks to himself in his own 
half-intelligible lingo about the secret prob- 
lems of his thought. There must some- 
where exist, thinks Shakespeare, a reality of 
which our thought is the image. A very 
similar passage occurs when Troilus discov- 
ers the perfidy of Cressida and proceeds to 
reason in an uninspired way about abstrac- 
tions. His Cressida could not act thus ; then 
there must be two Cressidas : 



GREEK GENIUS 

Troilns. . . . O madness of discourse, 
That cause sets up with and against thy- 
self! 
Bi-f old authority ! where reason can re- 
volt 
Without perdition, and loss assume all 
reason. 

It may be remarked that all through 
Shakespeare we come upon passages which 
we must read twice, because we must find 
the key to them; and the key is generally 
something profound. A page or two earlier 
in this play Cressida says: *'Blind fear 
that, seeing reason leads, finds safer footing 
than blind reason stumbling without fear. 
To fear the worst oft cures the worst." His 
mind is so full of these abstractions that he 
tumbles them out sometimes in paradox. 
In moments of great excitement he makes 
them sing. But in Troiliis and Cressida 
there is nothing to stimulate him to the pitch 
where philosophy turns into music. 

On the other hand, those easier thoughts 
and more familiar themes which are the 
give-and-take of drama live so within his 
mastery that any pebble sets them off, as, 
for instance, the thought of honour. At the 



SHAKESPEARE 

close of the family scene Troilus speaks with 
the tongue of Henry V : 

Troilus. Why, there you touched the life of 

our design : 
Were it not glory that we more affected 
Than the performance of our heaving 

spleens, 
I would not wish a drop of Trojan blood 
Spent more in her defence. But, worthy 

Hector, 
She is a theme of honour and renown, 
A spur to valiant and magnanimous 

deeds. 
Whose present courage may beat down 

our foes, 
And fame, in time to come, canonise us : 
For, I presume, brave Hector would not 

lose 
So rich advantage of a promis'd glory 
As smiles upon the forehead of this 

action 
For the wide world's revenue. 

Immediately upon this fluent and appro- 
priate climax there follows more Thersites, 
and a scene in which Ajax is made the butt 
of sham flattery, — all most truly Shake- 
spearian and most truly horse-play. 



GREEK GENIUS 

We now approach the great scene of the 
play, in which Ulysses endeavours to per- 
suade Achilles to abandon his ill-humour 
and fight. It seems impossible that Shake- 
speare should have read any translation of 
Homer, though he is supposed to have read 
Chapman; for Shakespeare imagines that 
Achilles* wrath was the result of sheer, 
motiveless ill-temper. He neglects the splen- 
did dramatic reason for the wrath, namely, 
that the girl Briseis had been reft from 
Achilles by Agamemnon. Ulysses, then, 
after gaining the attention of Achilles by a 
ruse, approaches him with an argument 
based upon a philosophic abstraction so in- 
tellectual that Plato would have pricked up 
his ears at it. But no one except a profes- 
sional casuist would be apt to guess what 
Ulysses was talking about : 

Ulysses. A strange fellow here 

Writes me : That man, how dearly ever 

parted. 
How much in having, or without or in, 
Cannot make boast to have that which- he 

hath. 
Nor feels not what he owes, but by 

reflection ; 



SHAKESPEARE 

As when his virtues shining upon others 
Heat them, and they retort that heat again 
To the first giver. 

Achilles' reply surprises us, because it is 
academic, lacking all heat and passion. He 
thinks Ulysses' idea is very suggestive, very 
helpful. 

Achilles. This is not strange, Ulysses. 
The beauty that is borne here in the face 
The bearer knows not, but commends 

itself 
To others' eyes: nor doth the eye itself, 
That most pure spirit of sense, behold 

itself, 
Not going from itself; but eye to eye 

oppos'd 
Salutes each other with each other's form : 
For speculation turns not to itself 
Till it hath travell'd, and is married there 
Where it may see itself. This is not 

strange at all. 

Ulysses "distinguishes," as the logicians 
would say : 

Ulysses. I do not strain at the position, 
It is familiar, but at the author's drift. . . . 

1:1833 



GREEK GENIUS 

Ulysses now develops his proposition, 
which is that men receive their own spiritual 
fulfilment through the effect which they 
produce upon others. The thought here 
reaches its last attenuation. The two heroes 
seem to be absorbed in bending over a game 
of metaphysical checkers. Then Ulysses 
launches his great, beautiful exhortation, 
one of the most remarkable speeches in all 
Shakespeare : 

Ulysses. Time hath, my lord, a wallet at 

his back. 
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion ; 
A great-siz'd monster of ingratitudes : 
Those scraps are good deeds past; which 

are devoured 
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon 
As done : perseverance, dear my lord. 
Keeps honour bright: to have done, is to 

hang 
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail 
In monumental mockery. Take the 

instant way : 
For honour travels in a strait so narrow, 
Where one but goes abreast : keep then 

the path ; 
For emulation hath a thousand sons 
That one by one pursue: if you give way, 

1:1843 



SHAKESPEARE 

Or hedge aside from the direct forthright, 
Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush by, 
And leave you hindmost ; 
Or, like a gallant horse f all'n in first rank, 
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear, 
O'errun and trampled on : then what they 

do in present. 
Though less than yours in past, must 

o'ertop yours ; 
For time is like a fashionable host 
That slightly shakes his parting guest by 

the hand. 
And with his arms outstretch'd, as he 

would fly, 
Grasps-in the comer : welcome ever smiles. 
And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not 

virtue seek 
Remuneration for the thing it was ; 
For beauty, wit. 
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in 

service, 
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all 
To envious and calumniating time. 
One touch of nature makes the whole 

world kin. 
That all with one consent praise new-born 

gawds. 
Though they are made and moulded of 

things past. 



GREEK GENIUS 

And give to dust that is a little gilt 
More laud than gilt o'er-dusted. 
The present eye praises the present object : 
Then marvel not, thou great and complete 

man, 
That all the Greeks begin to worship 

Ajax ; 
Since things in motion sooner catch the 

eye 
Than what not stirs. The cry went once 

on thee. 
And still it might, and yet it may again. 
If thou wouldst not entomb thyself alive. 
And case thy reputation in thy tent ; 
Whose glorious deeds, but in these fields 

of late. 
Made emulous missions 'mongst the gods 

themselves. 
And drave great Mars to faction. 

The head and flow of eloquence in this 
speech carries Shakespeare over into a sense- 
less but magnificent eulogy of the secret ser- 
vice of Agamemnon's government, through 
whose clever work Achilles* attachment to 
one of Priam's daughters has been discov- 
ered. The eloquence is checked suddenly, 
however, by a ditch of bad taste, almost of 
obscenity, and ends in a few flat lines. Such 



SHAKESPEARE 

is Shakespeare,— so unconscious, so indif- 
ferent ; so at the mercy of what is in progress 
before him and within him; so unprincipled 
in his art; so gifted in his mind. 

There is yet another page of the play on 
which shines a genius like that of Romeo 
and Juliet. Something in the sudden and 
enforced parting of Troilus and Cressida 
reminds Shakespeare of the tender agony of 
such partings, which he must himself have 
known or he could not have written : 

Troilus 

We two, that with so many thousand 

sighs 
Did buy each other, must poorly sell 

ourselves 
With the rude brevity and discharge of 

one. 
Injurious time now with a robber's haste 
Crams his rich thievery up, he knows not 

how: 
As many farewells as be stars in heaven, 
With distinct breath and consign'd kisses 

to them. 
He fumbles up into a loose adieu : 
And scants us with a single famish'd kiss, 
Distasted with the salt of broken tears. 



GREEK GENIUS 

I have not cited the httle golden bits that 
gleam through Troilus and Cressida. Any 
reader can find them for himself. But there 
is no foil of drama behind these stray- 
jewels. The play constantly reminds us of 
Shakespeare's other worlds. Perhaps it 
supplied him with no controlling mood, and 
he was thus led to filch from his other 
moods. One might think that the following 
lines must come out of Othello. Troilus is 
warning Cressida not to forget him among 
the dances and gaieties of the Grecian camp : 



But I can tell that in each grace of these 
There lurks a still and dumb-discoursive 

devil 
That tempts most cunningly. But be not 

tempted. 

I must cite also a clever remark about 
women which is put in the mouth of Ulysses 
by the great observer and lover of women, 
Shakespeare. It is coldly and somewhat 
coarsely said, and is extremely abstract, in- 
tellectual, world-wise; yet it records and 
pictures a certain type of woman very per- 
fectly : 



SHAKESPEARE 

Ulysses. ...... 

O ! these encounterers, so glib of tongue, 
That give accosting welcome ere it comes, 
And wide unclasp the tables of their 

thoughts 
To every ticklish reader, set them down 
For sluttish spoils of opportunity, 
And daughters of the game. 

Throughout the play we have been in 
contact with the power of abstract reason- 
ing, clothed at times in images so bright and 
easy as to make it beautiful, fading at times 
into commonplace, and often replaced by 
feeble humour and empty talk. The fact 
that the theme does not interest the poet 
isolates the jets of his talent and in some de- 
gree analyses the man for us. There is, as 
it were, no character-interest in this play, no 
lago, no Shylock, no Romeo; and there is 
no plot. I can find no unity in it, and yet it 
is full of the greatest talent for writing that 
a man ever possessed. This talent seems to 
roll about like a hulk in the trough of the 
sea. 

But Shakespeare knew nothing of all 
this. He was as much at home in the mud 
as in the rainbow, and spent perhaps not so 
much time over his Troilus and Cressida as 



GREEK GENIUS 

any one will who tries to understand the 
play. Shakespeare had no intentions, but 
wrote as Mozart wrote. Very unlike Mo- 
zart was he: for parts of Shakespeare are 
ugly, and much of him is whimsical, and 
some of him is perverted. But his work is 
all a natural product, like the silk-worm's 
thread. One can never be quite sure that 
even Thersites may not show under the 
microscope some beautiful pattern on his 
back, as Caliban does. 

Perhaps half the error in the world re- 
sults from providing other people with in- 
tentions; and perhaps the unique power of 
Shakespeare consists in the fact that he had 
none. He rolls in the waters of his thought, 
fathoms deep, without attempt to save him- 
self, without interest or knowledge as to 
where he is or in what direction he moves. 
He is unconscious, like an infant ; and open- 
ing his eyes on the nearest object, remem- 
bers the remotest with no consciousness of 
transition. His mind is like a windmill that 
makes no effort, but merely transmits natu- 
ral force; and his thoughts hit us with the 
power of all nature behind them. They are 
ingenuous, spontaneous, almost unexamined. 



1:1903 



THE MELANCHOLY PLAYS 

IN the full tide of one of Shakespeare^s 
great arguments, as in Lear or in Ham- 
let, the forces are stupendous, yet through 
the perfection of the invisible machinery of 
the play there is nothing which we can take 
hold of, saying, ''Here lies the power." It 
is the same with all other very great works 
of art. They teach us, themselves, but will 
not answer questions as to how it is done. 
Thus it comes about that one can best study 
the minds of great artists in their lesser and 
imperfect works. Here we find problems 
not too complex and a velocity of thought 
not so high as to defy pursuit. It is for this 
reason that a chapter has been devoted to 
Troilus and Cressida; and for the same rea- 
son it is well to turn over the leaves of 
Shakespeare^s other minor plays by the light 
of whatever we happen to know, whether of 
life or of literature. 

Shakespeare was subject to fits of gloomy 

1:190 



GREEK GENIUS 

depression, or he never could have left be- 
hind such sad documents as some of these 
minor plays. How far the melancholy is 
due to the plot, and how far to the poef s 
own circumstances, we can never know. 
But we may assume that Shakespeare's 
mood as we find it in any play was the mood 
which governed him in the choice of the 
story. All's Well that Ends Well falls into 
the list of plays that leave us sad. Melan- 
choly moulders in the very title of it; for 
we feel that all is not well nor ever has been 
nor can be well again. There was not much 
in the box of life; and there has been a great 
pother about opening it and shutting it, and 
at last it is shut up with a triumphant and 
sudden major chord, but the box is empty. 
All's Well that Ends Well is one of the plays 
in which an Italian plot proves to be an in- 
digestible morsel to the English playwright. 
Why could not Shakespeare have treated 
this plot in the spirit of the Taming of the 
Shrew, which makes no moral appeal ? The 
reason is that behind Shakespeare's Taming 
of the Shrew there was an old Italian com- 
edy which gave him his colouring, whereas 
in All's Well he is adapting an older English 
play, which had taken an Italian fable se- 
riously. The plot is at war with the drama- 



SHAKESPEARE 

tist, and neither one comes off wholly 
victorious. In some of his Italian stories — 
as in Romeo and Juliet — Shakespeare trans- 
mutes all the characters into himself, and 
triumphs. But in others he fails. The tales 
of the Italian prelate Bandello, in which 
wives disguise themselves and seduce their 
husbands, soldiers stab and throw dice, wid- 
ows climb in and out of windows, and all 
men wear masks and take life lightly, are so 
foreign to Northern sentiment, that in giv- 
ing them life Shakespeare often equivocates. 
The plot of All's Well is as follows : A maid 
cures a sick king, who promises to give her 
whatever bridegroom she shall choose in 
marriage. She chooses Bertram, with 
whom she has long been in love, and who 
flees the court upon the announcement that 
he must wed her. The rest of the story con- 
sists in the lady's contriving a secret assigna- 
tion with Bertram, unknown to the man 
himself, who thereupon repents, marries her, 
and "airs well." Such a degraded plot 
might well daunt a romantic spirit. Even the 
genius of Shakespeare has been foiled by 
this material. There is no character in All's 
Well that Ends Well that can attract us, ex- 
cept the old Countess Mother, who is a 
secondary subject, a still-life portrait, and 
1:193;] 



GREEK GENIUS 

Lafeu, the old lord, who is a happy thought, 
done with a few strokes by the great play- 
wTight. The other characters are rendered 
gloomy by the exigencies of the plot. Ber- 
tram has been carefully understood, from 
the Northern point of view, as a sneak; 
Helena is sentimentalised in a manner so at 
war with her conduct as to make her repel- 
lent ; Parolles is a bore. 

There are points in this play, as in all the 
others, in which Shakespeare never fails. 
You may call him up at one in the morning, 
after he has left the tavern at midnight, and 
he will give you the speech of the innocent 
young girl at any desired length and of un- 
failing beauty. So, in this play, the speeches 
of the heroine, Helena, at the beginning of 
the play are charming,— till we find out 
what her course of action is to be. She 
starts off, as it w^ere, with being Miranda; 
but, having cured the King, she bargains for 
a husband as follows : 

Helena. Then shalt thou give me with thy 
kingly hand 
What husband in thy power I will com- 
mand: 
Exempted be from me the arrogance 
1:1943 



SHAKESPEARE 

To choose from forth the royal blood of 

France, 
My low and humble name to propagate 
With any branch or image of thy state ; 
But such a one, thy vassal, whom I know 
Is free for me to ask, thee to bestow. 

Miranda soon disappears in the Italian in- 
trigue, and never comes out alive. In the 
end Helena plays the part of a bawd. Per- 
haps this plot might have been carried 
through as a fairy story; but Shakespeare 
treats it with naturalism. He is doing his 
best with the tale, and grinds away at Pa- 
rolles and at the episode of the drum. Why 
is not all this genial and amusing, like Fal- 
staff or Twelfth Night? Shakespeare's 
heart is not in it, nor his head, either. There 
is, in truth, nothing here to excite him. He 
is conscientiously and cleverly staging the 
story, which is artificial and mundane. 
There is no point at which he can deliver a 
metaphysical remark about the other world. 
— Yes, there is one; and the words are put 
into the mouth of La feu, who comments 
upon the King's recovery as follows : 

"They say miracles are past ; and we have 
our philosophical persons, to make modern 

D95n 



GREEK GENIUS 

and familiar things supernatural and cause- 
less. Hence is it that we make trifles of ter- 
rors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming 
knowledge, when we should submit ourselves 
to an unknown fear." 

The profundity of Lafeu's idea is aston- 
ishing, and amounts to this : every explana- 
tion of the miraculous is superficial ; behind 
all there must be a deeper miracle, which is 
not explained. The King's recovery re- 
minds Shakespeare of this whole field of 
thought; but the action of the play presses, 
and he moves on. 

At the bottom of our distress over Helena 
in All's Well there lies a dramatic difliculty. 
What we call a character in a play is a result, 
and not a prefigured idea. Shakespeare's 
characters result from his plots ; and where 
a story is too artificial, even Shakespeare 
can do no more than throw out occasionally 
a good idea which is neutralised by the 
sequel. No matter how great a painter may 
be, he cannot admit false lights into his can- 
vas without spoiling its atmosphere. In 
romantic drama a character is a mere draw- 
ing in smoke,— perfect so long as it is un- 
touched, but the merest breath will confuse 
it. Cordelia lives in her few speeches, and is 



SHAKESPEARE 

as solid as marble. If the plot of King Lear 
had required some subsequent banality from 
Cordelia, Shakespeare would not have hesi- 
tated for a moment. He would have dashed 
it in and gone to dinner, and we of the 
twentieth century should have been made to 
feel a little gloomy by it. 

In Measure for Measure there is a much 
severer gloom than in All's Well. Here is 
a comedy to make a man drown himself and 
have Shakespeare's name carved on his 
tomb. There is a running accompaniment 
of great intellect in this play, whose action 
goes forward in a twilight of blighted silver, 
with no sunlight in it. In the poetic scenes 
there is the rhetoric of Prospero without his 
power. In the comic interludes there is the 
manner of Eastcheap without its humour. 

Here again, as in AWs Well, the innocent 
woman receives the few streaming shafts 
from heaven in a couple of scenes of great 
tragedy. The rest of the play follows out in 
detail a painful intrigue, through which the 
villain, Angelo, is safely married off to his 
old neglected sweetheart, Mariana of the 
Moated Grange. In the somewhat sudden 
wind up, every one shakes hands all round 
in a fashion worthy of Dickens, and the cur- 
tain falls. 

1:1973 



GREEK GENIUS 

In Measure for Measure the suggestion 
of the wicked Judge, Angelo, that he shall 
pardon Isabella's brother, but at the price of 
her own honour, gives rise to a tragic situa- 
tion of the first magnitude; and the play 
immediately soars into tragedy as naturally 
as if Lear were on the stage. Isabella is a 
novice in a convent. Her directness and 
promptitude of mind are as marked as 
her innocence. Shakespeare's good women 
never understand evil. When her brother's 
friend, Lucio, the man about town, explains 
to her that her brother, Claudio, has been 
condemned to death through the enforce- 
ment of the old law against adultery, she 
does not comprehend. Her innocence strikes 
poetry into the debauchee. He apologises 
for his plainness of speech : 

Lucio. ...... 

I hold you as a thing ensky'd, and sainted 
By your announcement, an immortal 

spirit. 
And to be talk'd with in sincerity, 
As with a saint. 

He explains the matter again, and in lan- 
guage which no one can mistake. She 
understands now, but is not sure. 
D983 



SHAKESPEARE 

Isabella. Someone with child by him ?— My 
cousin Juliet? 

It is agreed that she shall intercede 
with the Judge, Angelo. At her second 
interview with Angelo, when he proposes 
the infamous bargain, she misunderstands 
for a long time, and then bursts into flame 
as naturally as a peasant woman might do : 

Aug. Believe me, on mine honour, 

My words express my purpose. 

Isab. Ha ! little honour to be much believed, 
And most pernicious purpose!— Seeming, 

seeming! — 
I will proclaim thee, Angelo ; look for 't : 
Sign me a present pardon for my brother, 
Or with an outstretched throat I'll tell the 

world 
Aloud what man thou art. 



It next becomes her duty to consult 
Claudio, her brother, about the whole mat- 
ter. And Claudio is shaken by the fear of 
death. This is one of Shakespeare's besieg- 
ing thoughts, and the young Claudio, a 
somewhat unideaed youth, speaks with the 
tongue of Hamlet's father : 

1:199:1 



GREEK GENIUS 

Ay, but to die, and go we know not 

where ; 
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot ; 
This sensible warm motion to become 
A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit 
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside 
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice ; 
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds, 
And blown with restless violence round 

about 
The pendant world ; or to be worse than 

worst 
Of those that lawless and incertain 

thoughts 
Imagine howling!— 'tis too horrible. 
The weariest and most loathed worldly 

life, 
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment 
Can lay on nature is a paradise 
To what we fear of death. 
Isab. Alas ! alas ! 

Claud. Sweet sister, let me live. 

What sin you do to save a brother's life, 
Nature dispenses with the deed so far 
That it becomes a virtue. 
Isab. O you beast ! 

O faithless coward ! O dishonest wretch ! 
Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice? 
Is 't not a kind of incest, to take life 
1:^2002 



SHAKESPEARE 

From thine own sister's shame ? What 

should I think ? 
Heaven shield, my mother play'd my 

father fair; 
For such a warped slip of wilderness 
Ne'er issu'd from his blood. Take my 

defiance : 
Die ; perish ! Might but my bending down 
Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should 

proceed. 
I'll pray a thousand prayers for thy death, 
No word to save thee. 

Here is womanhood from queen to peas- 
ant, and drama from eternity to eternity. 
But there is not much of either in Measure 
for Measure, — not enough of either to drag 
the play in the great procession of Shake- 
speare's tragedies. For this same woman, 
Isabella, at the close of the play is made to 
simulate another woman in making (not 
keeping) an assignation. The innocent, 
fiery Isabella of the earlier act would never 
have consented to play out the licentious 
Italian comedy which Shakespeare casts her 
for in the last act. The spectator feels this, 
and resents the soil which Shakespeare has 
cast on his own creation. But for this 
slander, Isabella would have taken her place 



GREEK GENIUS 

beside Desdemona and Imogen. But Shake- 
speare sometimes had bad taste; or, rather, 
he had no taste at all : for taste is conscious 
art. 

While all these things have been going on 
in Measure for Measure, the rightful Duke 
has made a pretended abdication, and has 
been moving about in the disguise of a friar, 
ready to appear as dens ex machina at the 
proper moment. For some reason which I 
cannot fathom this device is dramatically 
ineffective. It would have been better if the 
old Duke had been kept entirely out of the 
way till the climax. But in that case we 
should have missed another most Shake- 
spearian lecture on death which the Duke-as- 
Friar delivers in the jail to the condemned 
Claudio, and which colours the play. 

Claud. The miserable have no other 
medicine. 
But only hope. 

I have hope to live, and am prepar'd to 
die. 
Duke. Be absolute for death; either death, 
or life, 
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus 

with life:— 
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing 
1:2023 



SHAKESPEARE 

That none but fools would keep ; a breath 

thou art, 
Servile to all the skyey influences, 
That do this habitation, where thou 

keep'st, 
Hourly afflict. . . . 

In this long speech, of which I give only 
the opening, Hamlet, Macbeth, Prospero, 
Touchstone, and many others peep out, but 
there is no new character. The speech is a 
gloomy and decorative bit of rhetoric, sin- 
cere only in that it somehow depicts Shake- 
speare's mood. As for Angelo himself, 
with his gravity, his sudden, unconvincing 
lust, and his final happy marriage, the plot 
precludes his being a human character at all. 
There is no such man. It must be observed, 
in closing Measure for Measure, that the 
whole play is marked by a quite unnecessary 
grossness, — the indecency which goes with 
melancholy and is a part of it. 

Every one should read Tim on of Athens, 
and see whether a moral can be drawn out of 
it. Shakespeare seems to have chosen the 
plot because he was in ill-humour, perhaps 
sick. Feeling thoroughly cynical, he seems 
to have expected to write a cynical play. The 
cynicism in Timon, however, is so evenly 



GREEK GENIUS 

distributed among so many characters that 
all the dramatic effect of it is lost. The play 
is thus without idea, and its incidents are 
absurdly dull. A sort of malevolence ex- 
hales from it, but nothing that can be 
thought of as philosophy. Timon, after a 
life of senseless expenditure, grows poor, 
and is surprised to find that his creditors and 
the sycophants who had surrounded him in 
prosperity do not love him in his disgrace. 
He therefore leaves Athens and digs in the 
earth for roots. In digging he finds gold, 
and with this he subsidises Alcibiades, who 
is also in exile, to avenge the injuries of 
both by destroying Athens. The play is too 
Elizabethan, too near the charade, and too 
shallow to be interesting as a play ; but it is 
full of truly Shakespearian touches in the 
language. Shakespeare's genius has evi- 
dently been unable to take hold of this mate- 
rial. It was his habit to seize his themes 
experimentally, and he never knew what was 
coming out of a plot. He began at once, 
without knowing just where he was to end, 
and he never found the same theme twice. 
His most tremendous effects are due to this 
method, and his "effects defective" also 
come by this cause. When tragedy unrolls 
out of his gossamer, it arrives as a gift of 



SHAKESPEARE 

nature, — born, not made. It has the bril- 
Hancy of the humming-bird and the edge of 
the sword-Hly's leaf. Romeo and Juliet has 
in it the morn and liquid dew of youth. 
When the subject yields no tragedy, as in 
Coriolanus, — why, then you may take what 
you get. There was nothing in the subject, 
as it turns out. We can blame nobody for 
our disappointments in the Melancholy 
Plays. No one is responsible. 



C^os] 



VI 



CONTACT with Shakespeare's large, 
impersonal mind makes us bigger. A 
man does not need to read a play through in 
order to receive the poet's influence, which is 
like an electric stimulation and affects our 
whole being, though we receive it through 
the finger-tips. If one could find two boys 
of twelve who were exactly alike, and if one 
of them should begin to read Shakespeare 
with interest, he would become more intelli- 
gent than the other lad within fifteen min- 
utes. The acceptability of Shakespeare to 
the young is one of his divinest qualities. 
There is, as it were, a ready-made world 
which Shakespeare slides into our minds 
long before we are capable of receiving the 
real world. This Shakespearian world is 
healthier, happier, and infinitely cleverer 
than the real world. Its eloquence is run- 
ning at a high speed, and the smallest con- 
1:2073 



GREEK GENIUS 

tact with any word in it makes our entire 
system stand erect. 

Shakespeare's intelHgence was completely 
developed. There were matters that did not 
interest him; but everything that he knew 
was co-ordinated. He always speaks from 
the same pulpit. This is not obvious, — in- 
deed, it is the last thing that many people 
would say about him,— because we do not 
know where that pulpit w^as, nor how he got 
into it. But his phrases always come from 
the same personality, from the same intel- 
lectual outlook. It is as if the human soul 
consisted of an infinite series of concentric 
spheres, one inside the other, and Shake- 
speare's voice always caused the same sphere 
to resound. When we hear the ring of it 
we cry, ^'Shakespeare !" in our sleep. He 
is a metaphysical unity, and all his charac- 
ters are merely Shakespeare— Shakespeare 
with rays of humour about his head, or with 
an old cloak from some royal coronation 
upon his shoulders. We cannot distinguish 
between the man and the artist. The man 
and the artist are one. 

It is this disappearance of the man into the 
artist, by the way, that has so puzzled the 
world about Shakespeare's personality. Peo- 
ple are ever searching for the mask, and 



SHAKESPEARE 

there is no mask. Ambition is what reveals 
men, and he had no ambition. Motive is 
what shows men's contours, and he had no 
motive. He had no desire to conceal him- 
self, but he vanishes in a witticism because 
he is all wit. During his lifetime he was so 
logically perfect in his indifference that no 
one especially noticed his existence ; and he 
passed through life as a pleasant fellow of 
no great importance, leaving such a minimum 
of personal reminiscences in the minds of 
his contemporaries that people now think 
him a mystery. The real mystery, however, 
is one which the knowledge of personal 
facts could not solve for us. 

He has left the most powerful record of 
the kind of man he must have been by leaving 
a vacuum. His life and mind are a monu- 
ment to the unknowable. The vanishing- 
point is in every moment of his thought and 
in every line of his work, and he has van- 
ished into it. The average man is puzzled 
by this outcome. He thinks that the infinite 
is an algebraical term or a poetic sentiment ; 
and Shakespeare presents him with the in- 
finite in flesh and blood. 

There are certain very categorical minds, 
often very strong minds, that feel a chal- 
lenge in this whole phenomenon of Shake- 

1:2093 



GREEK GENIUS 

speare's unknowability. They are excited 
and almost angered by it. They must and 
will understand. Hence the prodigious 
literature of quack discovery about Shake- 
speare. Now the quack is a man whose sen- 
timent is not satisfied unless he discovers 
something that is not there. If he should 
find a true thing, it would coalesce with the 
rest of truth and somewhat defeat his ambi- 
tion; he would never be satisfied with it. 
Each one of the new pundits has therefore a 
theory of his own and betrays a kind of 
megalomania in regard to it. All this false 
learning is a by-product of Shakespeare's 
metaphysical influence, much as the ten 
thousand dogmas of Christianity are the re- 
sult of Christ's thought as it acts upon minds 
which resent the abstraction of that thought. 
Shakespeare belongs to the Renaissance. 
We feel this quite distinctly in considering 
his relation to religion. Like the great 
pagan painters of the Italian Renaissance, 
he knows only so much of religion as his art 
teaches him,— as his art made necessary. 
There are some kinds of painting which 
imply religion. Paul Veronese, through 
sheer aesthetic necessity, paints a saint, paints 
a Pentecost. Guido Reni paints a Cruci- 
fixion which touches the sphere of religious 

1:2101 



SHAKESPEARE 

truth. In such cases the artistic illumination 
suffices for the artistic need; but one step 
beyond it the artist does not go. So in 
Shakespeare there are decorative phrases of 
a religious beauty which is lent to him by 
the thing in hand,— I mean by the spiritual 
mise en scene. 
For instance : 

"In those holy fields 
Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, 
Which fourteen hundred years ago were 

nailed 
For our advantage on the bitter cross." 

Again : 

"He gave his honours to the world again, 
His blessed past to heaven, and slept in 
peace." 

This kind of religious feeling in Shake- 
speare is a sort of feudal tapestry with which 
he adorns his banqueting-hall. Perhaps the 
political conditions of his day helped to 
banish religious motives from his stage. 
One suspects in him also an instinctive 
avoidance of such motives on grounds of 
personal feeling. At any rate, the absence 

[211] 



GREEK GENIUS 

of religious motive colours the plays and 
gives them their quality. 

Shakespeare uses religious metaphors in 
much the same way that he uses mythology ; 
indeed, I should say that the pagan symbol- 
ism was dearer to him than the Christian. 
His whole work is tinged with the atmo- 
sphere of an imaginary antiquity, which 
comes to him from translations of Ovid, 
Plutarch, and Virgil, and which bears the 
same relation to classic feeling that the back- 
grounds in quattrocentist pictures bear to 
ancient Rome. He never came near enough 
to the Latin writers to be influenced by them 
in style or purpose. 

It is worth while to read the modest essay 
entitled Life of Shakespeare by Nicholas 
Rowe, Shakespeare's first editor, which w^as 
published in 1709, and which, on the whole, 
gives almost as good an account of the poet 
as the later critics have been able to work 
out. Rowe preserves a tradition, which the 
English scholars have somewhat neglected, 
that Shakespeare "died a Papist." That the 
poet should have accepted the final ministra- 
tions of a priest seems to chime in with what 
one finds in the plays. The tradition accords 
with the decorative piety of Shakespeare's 
spirit, and with the only doctrinal prejudice 



SHAKESPEARE 

which we can certainly perceive in his work, 
—namely, his dislike of the Puritans. He 
could hardly have been a "good" Catholic, or 
we should have found it out in a hundred 
ways ; but he was a romantic sceptic with a 
fondness for the dramatic beauties of the old 
religion. His Ghost in Hamlet is purgatorial 
and doctrinal,— just enough so for stage 
purposes. His marriages in the Comedy of 
Errors and in Romeo and Juliet are— well, 
they are really pagan, with a few candles and 
a vague Mother Church from No-Man^s- 
Land standing behind. So also his burials 
are scenic. The dirge over Imogen, on the 
other hand, is pantheistic. This is his own 
sort of religion,— and a sweet rhapsody it 
is. So in most of his discourses on death the 
romanticism and the scepticism reveal to us 
Shakespeare's personal church. 

With Shakespeare died the Renaissance 
in England. The psalm-singing weavers of 
w^hom he makes fun,— and not good-natured 
fun, either,— were to rule the land within a 
few years after his death. That they should 
cut so little figure in these plays, which teem 
with the national life, does not prove the 
non-existence of the pious weavers, but only 
that Shakespeare's thought did not receive 
them. It shows how special and peculiar is 



GREEK GENIUS 

the world in which lives the artist,— even 
the greatest artist. Every artist is an impe- 
rium in imperio, a cathedral with perhaps a 
dead town at its feet, or, as in this case, a 
Renaissance palace with a live town at its 
feet. 

With regard to the miraculous nature of 
life, Shakespeare never forgets it : it is every- 
where. He resents the mere notion of 
rationalism. He will not have it that any 
explanation is true. Throughout Hamlet 
and The Tempest— indeed, in all his plays 
—he shows his acquaintance with hypno- 
tism, telepathy, and the power of prayer,— 
with the potency of unseen forces which rule 
the world. ^'Spirits are not finely touched 
save to fine issues." The thing in hand is a 
part of something else ; men are projections 
of other powers, and what we see is due to 
the operation of something behind. His 
moralising largely consists in drawing our 
attention to these phenomena. "Canst thou 
who dost command the beggar's knee com- 
mand the health of it?" All these manifes- 
tations of spirit he knows not as theories or 
beliefs. He knows them in the raw, and sees 
them freshly as he speaks. 

It is just because Shakespeare insists on 
leaving matters in the mist in which they are 



SHAKESPEARE 

born that his thought endures. Persons who 
schematise the Unknowable codify them- 
selves, and pass by with the age they Hve in. 
The crucible of Shakespeare turns all to 
vapour, and leaves a Shakespearian cosmos 
which is at every point true to itself. He 
thus gives us an instantaneous vision of a 
single one of the infinite concentric worlds 
that slumber in each of us. 

Shakespeare's Universe is so at one with 
itself that it controls our attention like 
Greek art; and it is almost as far from 
the world of religion as Greek art is. That 
consciousness of the presence of God which 
invades men's emotions and almost extin- 
guishes the visible world for them is not in 
Shakespeare. Moreover, that desire to com- 
municate and spread the consciousness of 
God to others, which accompanies the expe- 
rience, is very far from Shakespeare. It 
w^ould be distasteful to him. He is with the 
primal intellect in such matters; and those 
views which are brought back and redeliv- 
ered to the intellect only after the intellect 
has suffered a thorough plunge, and has been 
for a time drowned in religious emotion, are 
unknown to him. 

I confess that the intellect often comes 
back melted and distorted from the drown- 



GREEK GENIUS 

ing experiences of religion, and that religion 
has thus sent down through the centuries a 
track of distorted intellect, side by side with 
the track of sanctity, of benevolence, and of 
natural power. Nevertheless, the emotional 
consciousness of God is one of the most 
important factors in human history. It 
moulds and changes humanity. This influ- 
ence did not pass through Shakespeare, and 
to transmit it is no part of his function. 
Thus it appears that the profoundest experi- 
ence of half mankind— to wit, religion— is 
not within the range of Shakespeare's sym- 
pathies; and yet he remains the greatest 
dramatist of the world. How does this come 
about? It comes about through the rarity 
of great genius, and through the vastness of 
range in human life. 

We can perhaps best realise the matter by 
turning to some entirely different field of 
thought. We see, for instance, in Beethoven 
or in Bach a talent comparable to Shake- 
speare's, exercised in a world quite different 
from Shakespeare's world. 

The great artist is, indeed, a rare person. 
There have been only a handful of them in 
the history of western Europe. And it is a 
notable thing that these great artists, while 
each one speaks from his own sphere, do not 

1:2163 



SHAKESPEARE 

attack one another. Shakespeare does not 
attack Plato ; nor Bach, Shakespeare. Even 
Chinese mysticism looms at us from the old 
pictures with meanings which are native to 
our Western sentiment. 

All forms of great art are cognate and 
support one another. Shakespeare is prob- 
ably the strongest personal influence of a 
purely intellectual kind in the world. He is 
one of the great sages of humanity who 
teach something to the master-intellects of 
each generation. And besides this, he is by 
far the most popular poet in the world, and 
teaches metaphysics to millions who do not 
know they are learning, but find in him 
merely a fellow-being who loves and un- 
derstands them. 



1:2173 



Ill 

BALZAC 



BALZAC 

THERE is in France a light literature 
which does not bear transportation. 
It can be properly read and enjoyed only 
within sight of the Institute. The works 
have not enough body in them to cross the 
Atlantic. A book of this sort becomes pre- 
tentious if read in Fifth Avenue; all the 
social amenities which must be read between 
the lines of it drop to the bottom of the flask 
and become unpleasant lees. But when read 
in Paris, and as it comes hot from the fau- 
teiiil, it is charming. It is redolent of good 
taste and delicate sentiment ; it is generally a 
small book, precise, well-considered and just 
a little (but, oh, so very little!) effete, and 
it flits across the Seine like a butterfly. It 
is really a conference which has escaped 
through the open windows where the Acad- 
emy is in session. 

Such a book is Faguet's Bahac. This 
volume is one of the series of Les Grands 
Ecrivains Frangais, which Messrs. Hachette 

[221] 



GREEK GENIUS 

are giving to the world, and it presents to 
us, in one picture, two of those figures which 
are pecuhar to French civihsation— the 
Great Master Balzac and the Little Master 
Faguet. By a remarkable feat of draughts- 
manship both figures are rendered by the 
same line. In snipping out the silhouette of 
Balzac with the sharpest of little scissors, 
M. Faguet has left a silhouette of himself 
cut in the black margin that falls to the 
ground. We are made to feel all through 
the book that the things which Balzac was 
not are the things which make up M. Faguet. 

This ever present sinuous line or profile 
divides the man of genius from his critic — 
separates the creative, unconscious, original 
mind of the artist Balzac from the sedulous 
mind of the critic Faguet. The men belong 
to different species. Balzac is a talented, 
lusty son of the people, who has picked up 
his knowledge here and there; Faguet is a 
careful student, who takes his college edu- 
cation very seriously. 

Perhaps the strong points of Balzac are 
so well understood in France that M. Faguet 
feels no need of enlarging upon them. He 
feels justified in launching out at once upon 
the deficiencies of the master, upon his ig- 
norance, bad taste, egoism, vulgarity, clum- 

1:222;] 



BALZAC 

siness, etc. An ignorant reader would be 
prone to ask : "But why does this excellent, 
learned gentleman, M. Faguet, waste his 
time on Balzac? The man is evidently not 
worth his pains." 

M. Faguet shows with a turn of his wrist 
that the political principles and religious 
beliefs of Balzac are not worthy to be called 
ideas, and that Balzac had no esthetique. 
Balzac lived, it appears, in a state of mental 
confusion. Balzac had a low view of human 
nature, and his central thought is the pes- 
simism of the cynic. 

But this is not all. Balzac, it appears, is 
not an artist. He has no sense of proportion 
and— O horror! O agony!— he confuses 
the genres; that is to say, he mixes in dis- 
quisitions with story-telling. All of Balzac's 
sins and defects are as nothing compared to 
this profanation of the genres. 

As the English reader may not understand 
about the genres, I must quote from M. 
Faguet himself. The following is but one 
of many passages in which M. Faguet, with 
sacred enthusiasm, protects the genres, 

*'C'est precisement la confusion des 
genres. Celui qui raconte ne doit pas dis- 
serter, sous peine de rendre son recit en- 
1:2233 



GREEK GENIUS 

nuyeux et, du reste, hy bride et ambigu. 
Celui qui enseigne ne doit pas raconter des 
histoires, mais seulement apporter comme 
preuves a I'appui de ce qu'il enseigne des 
exemples courts, concis et ramasses, sous 
peine de se faire oublier comme professeur, 
comme Tautre se faisait oublier comme con- 
teur. 

— Tourquoi ne pas confondre les 
genres? La distinction en est-elle aisee?' — 
Parce qu'a les confondre, a les meler, on 
affaiblit Tun et on affaiblit Tautre, ce qui 
fait que I'impression finale est faible." 

To suggest of Balzac that "the final impres- 
sion is feeble" is a novelty. This Balzac, who 
is no artist, whose ideas are mere impres- 
sions which he often does not understand 
himself, who mixes his genres so lamentably, 
who has no esthetique, is yet the most pow- 
erful writer France ever produced, and in 
influence (as Faguet confesses) must be 
ranked next to Montaigne, Voltaire, and 
Rousseau— this Balzac, according to M. 
Faguet, writes not v/ell, but badly. He 
scarcely ever writes well, and this only when 
he forgets himself. Another critic, M. 
Brunetiere, cited by Faguet, has been so 
struck with the badness of Balzac's writing 
1:2243 



BALZAC 

and the badness of Moliere^s writing that he 
has evolved a principle— ^'.^.^ that it is neces- 
sary to write badly in order to represent life 
("mal ecrire est une condition de la repre- 
sentation de la vie"). I wish that Moliere 
might have lived to hear this announcement, 
which reminds one of his own best manner. 

This whole matter of Balzac's style and 
manner of writing has been dealt with by all 
of his reviewers. It is a great subject because 
of Balzac's greatness. It was treated by 
Taine with a depth and originality of vision 
which leave nothing to be desired. And yet 
the reader of this essay will be indulgent if 
the subject comes to the surface from time 
to time ; for the questions raised by Balzac's 
style are so intimately related to his power 
that they refuse to be dismissed. Some new 
aspect of his power brings us face to face 
with a new aspect of his style. 

There is a charming story cited by M. 
Faguet about Balzac in his prime. At St. 
Petersburg a Russian lady was talking to 
him in her salon, when the door opened and 
a maid-servant entered bearing a plate. 
Upon hearing her mistress address the 
stranger as **M. de Balzac," the maid 
dropped the plate. 'This," said Balzac to 
his hostess, ''is fame !" 

1:2253 



GREEK GENIUS 

Now in reading through the very clever, 
very precise, very academic remarks of M. 
Faguet, I found myself muttering: "Yes, 
yes; that is all very true. Balzac has no 
ideas, no style; his mysticism is half sham. 
He has no art, no education. And yet, some- 
how, at the back of all this there is a big 
dynamic force in him— behind all, through 
all, he clutches my heart and brain— and not 
mine only, but everyone's. What was it that 
made that servant girl drop the plate ?" One 
could never find out this secret by reading 
the books of the Academy. 

The function of an academy is to sup- 
port good conventions, to encourage sound 
grammar, sensible spelling, clear handwrit- 
ing. But we must not look towards acad- 
emies for profound criticism. An academy 
always bristles with critical perceptions, but 
is an enemy to all genius except its own. An 
academy is always a sort of benevolent in- 
cubus. 

There never was a nation where the 
standards of good taste were so sedulously 
maintained as they are in France; and the 
French Academy, which presides over these 
correctnesses of taste, is the visible agent of 
a ruling passion. The French Academy is 
the organised taste of a nation which loves 

1:226: 



BALZAC 

correctness. At first glance an observer 
might conclude that the matter ended here ; 
and that the French Academy represented 
the sum total of the national genius. A 
slight acquaintance with France and with 
French history would show him that quite 
the reverse is true. The nation has con- 
stantly produced men who were too great to 
be understood by the Academy; men by 
whom— but that a law of nature forbids it — 
the Academy itself would have been vital- 
ised. 

To write about Balzac is like writing 
about a race or an epoch. Balzac is a litera- 
ture. No one can know the whole of him, 
any more than one can be acquainted with 
every shop window and every alley in Paris. 

If we should endeavour to cover the whole 
of Balzac geographically or statistically, we 
should lose the elasticity of our own minds 
in the process. We should be sure to lose 
Balzac himself if we made an attempt to 
catch him in a drag-net. 

We do not know just how his books differ 
from the rest of fiction, though it is certain 
that Balzac's fiction stands in a class by it- 
self, and that it is related to human life in a 
unique manner. The rest of prose fiction 
[2273 



GREEK GENIUS 

came into being in order that a vehicle and 
a tradition might exist in which Balzac 
should be possible. He is the Messiah of 
fiction. He imposes a whole world, a ro- 
mantic dispensation, an imaginary civilisa- 
tion, upon the rest of humanity ; and we of 
England or America accept this world, un- 
derstand it, and live in it without abandon- 
ing our own ideals and our ways of thought. 
We accept it on top of our own mode of 
life, as an imaginative reality, as a drama of 
humanity— a sort of classic, as powerful as 
Homer, and, perhaps, as remote from our- 
selves as the Homeric myths are. Such is 
Balzac. He is a cycle of myth, and has left 
himself upon the earth, like a wreath of 
cloud, an emanation of power, which the 
revolutions of the globe are spreading to 
new lands as the years go by. 

There is every sort of writing in Balzac's 
books, from the trivial and penny-dreadful 
stories of his youth to the dulness of some 
of the philosophic studies by which he set so 
much store. I am going to speak chiefly of 
his merits, and of these not as if I could 
analyse them. 

Real talent is always miraculous. Ana- 
tole France makes you see the picture of an 
episode with such vividness that you catch 

n2283 



BALZAC 

your breath. You have seen it through the 
back of the book, and cannot find the secret 
of it or tell the method by which it was done 
though you should eat the volume as St. 
John ate the book in his Apocalypse. The 
magic of the apt word is a peculiarly French 
gift, and is somehow connected with the 
Latin world and with Latin literary tradi- 
tion, and especially with the study of Horace, 
who outshines all his successors in the power 
of brevity. Horace's words are silent light- 
ning. Now Balzac has this gift of the 
magical word as well as the quite opposite 
gift of elaborate ratiocination. He has the 
gift of allowing his characters to speak for 
themselves; the gift of talking for them; 
the gift of sustaining a plot as complex as 
Buddhist philosophy, and which moves 
through scenes that are brilliant and unex- 
pected; the gift of creating an illusion of 
realism through the use of the most ex- 
travagant, romantic, unreal claptrap; the 
gift of alternately dazzling, stimulating, 
and informing the reader's mind till the 
reader gives up all hope of analysing his 
own sensations and surrenders himself heart 
and soul to the spell of the magician. 

We must remember that the term "real- 
ism" which is so often applied to Balzac, and 



GREEK GENIUS 

the whole cant of criticism through which 
Balzac's work is now viewed, have been in- 
vented since his day, and are ephemeral 
matters. To Balzac his characters were liv- 
ing creatures, active forces, incarnate 
ideas; and such they will remain after this 
shallow and absurd talk about realism has 
been forgotten. 

The internal world of his fiction is the real 
world for Balzac, and he contrives to make 
it the real world for his readers. He does 
this by methods which are so subtle that we 
can rarely perceive them. Neither are the 
methods intentional : they are instinctive, and 
they are ever new. It is by the merest chance 
that one can discover them. 

He creates his effects in a thousand differ- 
ent ways — sometimes dramatically, some- 
times logically and with painstaking effort, 
sometimes through an ejaculation or an 
aside of his own which seems unpremedi- 
tated, intimate, and has, one would say, no 
artistic right to exist. Again, he will in- 
troduce a long anecdote, holding fast to the 
reader's buttonhole as he does so, and fixing 
him with his eye. He thinks aloud, he 
gropes ; but he always lays his hand on the 
truth. Under the curtain that falls on a 
scene he sometimes hides a reflection of such 
[230] 



BALZAC 

depth as would warrant a chapter, and he 
seems not to know what he has done. Turn 
the page, and he is off on a new scent : there 
was no time for more. In moments of 
sohloquy he often flashes in a thought hav- 
ing httle relation to the plot, but which is 
nevertheless the best thing in the book. On 
other occasions he does not take the trouble 
to say just what has happened at a crisis, but 
leaves us to guess it from the context. The 
spontaneousness of the fact passes into Bal- 
zac's way of handling it. One sees it rather 
than reads of it; one experiences it rather 
than sees it. 

A strange fact about Balzac is that he is 
always interesting ; even when he bores us he 
interests us. There is a residuum in his 
thought. We go back to it after the book is 
closed ; we find it in our mind and ponder it. 

He seems to be at the mercy of a whim as 
to what he is going to say next. Sometimes, 
in the midst of a love scene, he will give a 
long discourse on the law of marriage, 
dumping in a sociological treatise with a 
certain parade of learning. Then, perhaps, 
comes an episode which is the fulfilment of 
a dramatic climax. A thousand threads 
cross each other here : it is a rond point in 
the labyrinth of the book, a place from 
[2313 



GREEK GENIUS 

which one expects vistas and summaries of 
reflections. But no! Balzac moves on 
without a pause. He has, it appears, al- 
ready made his effect. 

His manner of procedure in writing seems 
to be that of a man who, having been a wit- 
ness of certain events, should sit down and 
think aloud about them. During the process 
of this thinking aloud the story is told. The 
man does not write down all that he has seen 
or lived through. He sometimes omits large 
portions of drama, which, nevertheless, he 
knows all about. The events have occurred ; 
that is enough for Balzac. The reader must 
pick up his informatipn from the divagations 
of the witness-thinker. 

All these practices are not the elaborate 
devices of literary art, but, on the contrary, 
are the habits of a man who is so very fa- 
miliar with his subject that he can state it in 
fifty ways, and is, at best, merely giving to 
the reader the fringes of it. His very long- 
est and greatest books seem to be truncated 
or cut down, so that the story may get itself 
told. He is obliged to tear out as much as 
he tells — so one feels — in order to finish at 
all. 

These books are often not even divided 
into chapters, but move, like the Amazon 
1:2323 



BALZAC 

River, without a break, in one gigantic 
stream — overpowering, awful. 

It is not only in his fiction that he excels. 
His letters to his sisters, to his mother, to his 
young nieces, to the children of Madame 
Hanska, are each and all the very perfection 
of writing. Their spontaneous, powerful, 
rushing, humourous gaiety is in contrast to 
the sombreness of his fiction and completes 
the man. Every line he writes is full of 
genius. He is the natural, inevitable writer. 
You cannot gag him or dam the flow of 
him : he writes. His mind is full of foison, 
and he is a great reaper. He harvests the 
crop of his thoughts. 

I will give a few random examples of his 
methods, in order to remind the reader of 
their rapid quality — a sort of casual quality, 
which leaves us standing in the region of the 
unconscious, much as Rembrandt's art leaves 
us there. One or two of the examples shall 
be from La Coiisme Bette. 

Madame Hulot, a woman of fifty-five, a 
matron of ideal virtue, is beaten down by 
misfortunes until, for a moment, she loses 
her moral equilibrium. In a fit of despair 
over the misfortunes of her family she suc- 
cumbs to the idea of selling her own honour 
to a man who has formerly made love to 



GREEK GENIUS 

her, and who is the only man that, as mat- 
ters stand, can save the family. This is 
Monsieur Crevel. Her advances are rejected 
with contempt. The shock saves her; and 
she recovers her moral poise during a long 
speech in which she denounces herself : 

" 'Assez, monsieur Crevel !' dit madame 
Hulot en ne deguisant plus son degoiit et 
laissant paraitre toute sa honte sur son 
visage. ^Je suis punie maintenant au dela 
de mon peche. Ma conscience, si violem- 
ment contenue par la main de fer de la 
necessite, me crie a cette derniere insulte que 
de tels sacrifices sont impossibles. Je n'ai 
plus de fierte, je ne me courrouce point 
comme jadis, je ne vous dirai pas : "Sortez !" 
apres avoir regu ce coup mortel. J'en ai 
perdu le droit— je me suis offerte a vous, 
comme une prostituee. . . . 

^Oui,' reprit-elle en repondant a un geste 
de denegation, 'j'ai sali ma vie, jusqu'ici 
pure, par une intention ignoble; et . . . je 
suis sans excuse, je le savais! . . . Je me- 
rite toutes les injures dont vous m'accablez! 
Que la volonte de Dieu s'accomplisse! S'il 
veut la mort de deux etres dignes d'aller a 
lui, qu'ils meurent, je les pleurerai, je prierai 
pour eux! S'il veut I'humiliation de notre 
1:2343 



BALZAC 

famille, courbons-nous sous I'epee venge- 
resse, et baisons-la, chretiens que nous 
sommes! Je sais comment expier cette 
honte d'un moment qui sera le tourment de 
tous mes derniers jours. Ce n'est plus ma- 
dame Hulot, monsieur, qui vous parle ; c'est 
la pauvre, I'humble pecheresse, la chretienne 
dont le coeur n'aura plus qu'un seul senti- 
ment, le repentir, et qui sera toute a la priere 
et a la charite. Je ne puis etre que la der- 
niere des f emmes et la premiere des repenties 
par la puissance de ma faute. Vous avez ete 
I'instrument de mon retour a la raison, a la 
voix de Dieu qui maintenant parle en moi, je 
vous remercie! . . .' 

Elle tremblait de ce tremblement qui, de- 
puis ce moment ne la quitta plus. Sa voix 
pleine de douceur contrastait avec la fievreuse 
parole de la femme decidee au deshonneur 
pour sauver une famille. Le sang aban- 
donna ses joues, elle devint blanche et ses 
yeux furent sees.'* 

Crevel is touched by the beauty of Madame 
Hulot's character, and words of unexpected 
sympathy are exchanged between them. 
Then he says : 

" *Ne tremblez plus ainsi !' 

1:2353 



GREEK GENIUS 

*Est-ce que je tremble?' demanda la ba- 
ronne, qui ne s'apercevait pas de cette infir- 
mite si rapidement venue." 

Balzac has here somehow succeeded in refer- 
ring to the trembling of Madame Hulot as 
if it were a thing with which we were fa- 
miliar, — ''ce tremblement qui, depuis ce 
moment, ne la quitta pas,"— as If we had all 
known the lady in her later years, but had 
not heard before how her infirmity first 
came upon her. 

But there is yet deeper meaning in the 
scene. Madame Hulot's trembling-fit re- 
sulted, as one feels, from her recovery of her 
mental stability at the expense of her ner- 
vous system. The energy which rushed to 
her mind deserted her muscles. Balzac had 
thought all this out ; and in reading of it wt 
are moved not merely by his admirable 
brevity of expression, but by the fundamen- 
tal truth at the bottom of the whole matter. 
An author of this sort is more god than ar- 
tist. He trusts to his material : the saga will 
deliver itself. 

In the course of the same story the odious 
retired shopkeeper, Crevel, announces that 
he is going to marry the wicked adventuress 
who is the destroyer of all the happiness of 

1:2363 



BALZAC 

his family. The family is outraged, and a 
scene of general expostulation follows. 

"La baronne fit un signe a la comtesse, 
qui, prenant son enfant dans ses bras, lui dit : 

'Allons, viens prendre ton bain, Wences- 
las ! Adieu, monsieur Crevel !' 

La baronne salua Crevel en silence, et 
Crevel ne put s'empecher de sourire en 
voyant I'etonnement de Ten f ant quand il se 
vit menace de ce bain improvise.'* 

This astonishment of the child is as real and 
as accidental to the reader as it was to Bal- 
zac himself. 

Some years ago I went to a concert at St. 
James's Hall in London. In one of the in- 
termissions I recognised a very smart gentle- 
man at whose house I had been fifteen years 
before. I thought I would say how-d'-ye-do 
to him, though I inwardly knew it would be 
a foolish thing to attempt. I therefore ap- 
proached him and made myself known, and 
was shaken off in the approved London man- 
ner which was in fashion between the Fall 
of Napoleon and the close of the Boer War. 
As I sat thinking and wondering over this 
rebuff, I observed another very smart gentle- 
man approach the first, and the two shook 

1:237: 



GREEK GENIUS 

hands, saluted, dropped eye-glasses, cleared 
their throats, and paused in the correct man- 
ner. In Elizabeth's time they would have 
been slapping their thighs and swearing 
the oaths of the season. Were they not two 
bawcocks in excellent feather ? 

Yesterday I opened Balzac and read the 
following description — which, by the way, is 
dragged in by the heels, and has no dramatic 
context : 

"Le due d'HerouvIlle, poli comme un 
grand seigneur avec tout le monde, eut pour 
le comte de la Palferine ce salut particulier 
qui, sans accuser I'estime ou I'intimite, dit a 
tout le monde: *Nous sommes de la meme 
famille, de la meme race, nous nous valons !' 
Ce salut, le siboleth de I'aristocratie, a ete 
cree pour le desespoir des gens d'esprit de la 
haute bourgeoisie." 

Balzac, it will be noted, has explained the 
psychology of the greetings, which remains 
the same throughout the ages. He has 
shown the part which the spectator plays in 
the comedy. Is not this genius? Is not an 
eye like this one of the great orbs of litera- 
ture, and worthy to be named with the eye 
of Aristotle or of Dante? 

1:238: 



BALZAC 

At the opening oi Le Colonel Chabert 
Balzac describes the entry of the destitute 
old Colonel into the clerks' room of a 
notary's office. The clerks are eating their 
improvised lunch and chatting. None of 
them has any attention to give to the 
stranger, and his knock, if he gave one, is 
not answered. 

" 'Ou est mon canif ?' 

'Je dejeune !' 

'Va te faire lanlaire, voila un pate sur la 
requete !' 

*Chut, messieurs !' 

Ces diverses exclamations partirent a la 
fois au moment ou le vieux plaideur ferma 
la porte avec cette sorte d'humilite qui dena- 
ture les mouvements de I'homme malheu- 
reux. L'inconnu essaya de sourire, mais les 
muscles de son visage se detendirent quand 
il eut vainement cherche quelques symptomes 
d'amenite sur les visages inexorablement 
insouciants des six clercs.'* 

We see the poor outcast shutting the door 
in a never-to-be-forgotten attitude of abjec- 
tion. He is soon dismissed amid the jeers 
of the company, after which the clerks fall 
into conversation about him. 
[239:1 



GREEK GENIUS 

" *Ne voila-t-il pas un fameux crane?' dit 
Simonnin sans attendre que le vieillard eut 
f erme la porte. 

*I1 a I'air d'un deterre/ reprit le clerc. 

*C'est quelque colonel qui reclame un ar- 
riere/ dit- le maitre clerc. 

*Non, c'est un ancien concierge/ dit Gode- 
schal. 

Tarions qu'il est noble,' s'ecria Boucard. 

*Je parie qu'il a ete portier,' repliqua 
Godeschal. 'Les portiers sont seuls doues 
par la nature de carricks uses, huileux et 
dechiquetes par le bas comme Test celui de 
ce vieux bonhomme. Vous n'avez done vu 
ni ses bottes eculees qui prennent I'eau, ni sa 
cravate qui lui sert de chemise ? II a couche 
sous les ponts.' 

'II pourrait etre noble et avoir tire le cor- 
don !' s'ecria Desroches. 'Ca c'est vu.' " 

The clerks determine to recall the old gen- 
tleman and ask him his name. Again he 
climbs the stairs and confronts his tormen- 
tors with humility. Balzac has enhanced 
the pathos of old Chabert's figure by this 
background which shows us the flippancy, 
the natural, unconscious cruelty of youth. 
The old man is dismissed at last, and there 
follows a description of the happy, aimless, 
1:2403 



BALZAC 

genial chatter of the clerks as they resume 
their duties. Finally Balzac says : 

''Ceite scene represente un des mille plat- 
sirs qui, phis tard, font dire en pensant a la 
jeunesse: — C'etait le bon temps/' 

The italics are mine. Here, by a momen- 
tary throb of feeling, Balzac has touched the 
very nerve of truth. Out of the sordid dust- 
heap has sprung a flower. These dreadful 
clerks have opened a view into paradise. 

At what moment, we ask ourselves, did 
Balzac begin to vibrate with this lyric note, 
so unexpectedly and so strongly struck? If 
it were Victor Hugo or Dickens we could 
guess, but about Balzac we know nothing. 

AH this manner of procedure is very un- 
like the Gallic way of doing anything. The 
artistic vice of the French nation is a certain 
virtuosity, which they love to throw into 
everything they do. I have seen a French- 
man play a Bach sonata for the violin, and 
play it extremely well— but for the fact that 
he seemed to be doing it with a foil. He 
wished us all to cry, "Touche !" at the finish. 
The whole of French art and architecture, 

1:240 



GREEK GENIUS 

French music, manners, and cookery, betray 
a delight in form for form's sake. 

"S'il vous plait, madame!" says the 
farmer's daughter who has pushed a hand- 
cart of artichokes for nine miles to reach 
the gutter of the Rue St. Honore; ''s'il vous 
plait," she says to the frumpy old concierge, 
as she hands over the vegetables. "Merci, 
mademoiselle !" replies the concierge, giving 
some pennies. I have often wondered 
whether the excellent manners of the peas- 
antry are not due to the Ancien Regime. 
The Revolution destroyed the nobles, but 
the peasantry picked up politeness from the 
aristocracy as they drove it towards the guil- 
lotine. I can hardly believe that the old 
commeres in times before the Revolution 
called each other *'madame." All this for- 
malism is part of the play-instinct and of 
the aesthetic passion of the Ancien Regime. 
It is a part of that external grace which 
made life beautiful and turned every avoca- 
tion into an art. 

Such was the gift of Old France to the 
world : her nobles invented napkins and hou- 
tonnieres and a good way of doing every- 
thing; and most of the social civilisation that 
we know is due to France's love of form. 
The old French monarchy, from Louis XIII 
C242J 



BALZAC 

to Louis XVI, was the central social bureau 
for humanity, and taught everyone the 
proper way of writing, building, thinking, 
standing, complimenting, fighting, and liv- 
ing. 

This belief that form is an essential to 
all kinds of conduct is, of course, ever a lit- 
tle at war with the individual. The greatest 
writers of France, whether they lived before 
or after the classic period, have not always 
shared the conventional French spirit. Mon- 
taigne, Rabelais, the Due de Saint-Simon, 
and Balzac are writers of a popular school, 
indulging at will in vulgarisms and express- 
ing themselves with a sort of mediaeval free- 
dom which resembles the English rather than 
the French way of writing. All four of 
them despise the academic spirit, and run 
about like colts. To those Frenchmen who 
accept their own classic tradition, the writ- 
ers I have named savour a little of barbar- 
ism; to men of other nationalities these 
barbarians of France are the only writers of 
France who are quite free from the curling- 
tongs. 

Balzac is completely outside the frame of 
national correctness, and his language, as 
even a foreigner can feel, is academically 
outrageous. He is of the people, he is a man 



GREEK GENIUS 

of genius, he is unconscious, indifferent, 
preoccupied, whirled away in a chariot 
drawn by dragons. He is well fed, familiar, 
serious. He talks with the mouths of fifty 
dialects, with the slangs of every province 
and every arrondissemcnt, wnth the preten- 
sions and educational imperfections peculiar 
to each of his two thousand characters, with 
the exuberance of a gigantic nature. What, 
then, has become of the Academy? The 
Academy must be picked out of the debris, 
if the fragments can be found. Balzac up- 
sets the apple-cart of French classicism, and 
in doing so he makes the strongest com- 
mentary on it that has ever been made. 
Without such an upsetting there could have 
been no Balzac. 

The dream that Balzac dreamed was not 
a tale or a series of tales ; it was a society, or, 
more accurately speaking, a mythology. 
Instead of taking fifty characters, as the 
Greeks did, and writing plays about the 
dramatic moments in their lives, Balzac 
takes a whole epoch— and a very brilliant, 
topsyturvy epoch— and carries in his head 
the lives of all its inhabitants from youth to 
old age. Roughly speaking, this epoch was 
his own time, and it was, I suppose, the most 
dramatic epoch in history. If you will read 
1:2443 



BALZAC 

in M. Lenotre's works those sketches of the 
odd personaHties which came to the top in 
the Revolution, you will find more samples 
of incredible transformation, more varieties 
of fantastic change in role, than you could 
easily dig up out of the rest of the memoirs 
of Europe. The rise of the Napoleonic 
world, the fall of the ancient kingdom, the 
purgatorial and infernal interval of the Re- 
volution which connected these two eras, 
would have been enough for Dante. But 
Balzac had also the Restoration to draw on, 
and the age of Louis Philippe. I suppose 
that one could hardly put one's hand on a 
Frenchman, of whatever caste or class, born 
in 1780 and who survived until 1850, whose 
life would not show changes, powerfully col- 
oured and filled with frantic interest for a 
novelist. Balzac perceived this in his earliest 
years, and filled his mind with typical biog- 
raphies—of personages already costumed 
and documented, who lived in the closet of 
his mind, ready to walk on the stage of his 
fiction; men with ancestors and family his- 
tories, and with private lives that are full of 
kaleidoscopic change. They are the citizens 
of the imaginative world where Balzac him- 
self lived. If the story in hand needs a 
notary or a senator or a Napoleonic general, 
1:2453 



GREEK GENIUS 

a Jewish banker, a hangman's clerk, Balzac 
already has the man in his greenroom. He 
does not have to create him, as every other 
novelist must do; he simply refers to him— 
taps a bell, and in he walks. The wonderful 
single-phrase descriptions which gleam on 
every page of the novels owe their brilliancy 
to this familiarity of the author with his 
characters. 

Balzac was a philosopher, and he had been 
laying up observation, as the bee lays up 
honey, for years. His tale is a demonstra- 
tion ; it is a stair to some thought ; it exists 
not for its own sake, but for the sake of re- 
moter truth; it is an illustration and a 
parable. Old thoughts, observations made 
long ago, the wine that has lain for nine 
years in the cellar, types seen, philosophies 
guessed at, beliefs that are older than the 
work in hand, but leap out upon the work in 
hand as fire leaps towards the electric needle 
—these things are what give life and felicity 
to his vehicle. 

The vehicle was the Comedie Humaine, 
as he assembled it in his own mind. Here 
he created for himself a language that could 
say anything. The characters themselves 
are not men, but projections of thought; the 
colours in them result from the analysis of 

1:246: 



BALZAC 

light. Colours made in this way are the only 
colours that will hold; for colours that are 
ignorantly copied out of nature soon fade 
into nondescript. There is nothing in Bal- 
zac which is copied from nature. Every- 
thing has been first understood and then 
arranged so as to symbolise nature. There 
is nothing in Balzac that is not based on sane 
speculation, or that will not go back into the 
ten commandments. There is nothing that 
exists merely for the sake of the picturesque. 
Everything has been drenched in meaning. 

That it means so much to us who have no 
part or lot in it is proof that this world of 
Balzac's is a world of myth. These weird 
creatures of Balzac's brain— Rastignac, 
Goriot, Nucingen, Grandet— are not of the 
actual world. They are Gothic extrava- 
gances. Time may turn them into carica- 
tures, as time has begun to do with the 
creations of Dickens and Victor Hugo, but 
as yet the figures of Balzac are thrilling real- 
ities—unreal in form, true in substance, and 
among the most moving creations of human 
wit. 

The difference between him and other 
writers of fiction is that he did not wait for 
a story, but created a miniature world in 
which his stories are all related to one an- 
il ^47] 



GREEK GENIUS 

other. He is not content that a novel shall 
be a unity. A novel is only a spoke in the 
wheel of his unity. Each novel is a frag- 
ment, and yet it is as big as the Coliseum, 
and is meant to suggest the larger world of 
thought in which Balzac himself is living. 
He succeeds in this ambition, this desire to 
make us feel that all these characters and 
dramas are parts of something else; and in 
this he resembles Dante. Every line in Bal- 
zac bears a living relation to every other 
line. We cannot know just what that rela- 
tion is, but we feel that there is a connection. 
It is as if we were walking on the surface of 
some sphere and had gained a conviction as 
to the size and sweep of it through our feet. 

Balzac seems to be like Rembrandt and 
Shakespeare in that he is always Balzac, and 
yet he never does the same thing twice. He 
is always experimenting. He lives for him- 
self. He somehow housed the dream of his 
existence in his characters. He always 
maintained that his writings were but pages 
out of one great book. It is the triumph 
of contemplation. 

He has, as it were, no outer life : he is all 
artist. His works are not really works at 
all, but are what is left over in the mere 
process of the artist's existence. In making 

1:2483 



BALZAC 

them he is experiencing, he is searching. 
One cannot tell how much is improvisation 
and how much is calculation in Balzac. He 
will often preach extempore for thirty sec- 
onds, and then go on describing accessories, 
like a stage carpenter, for half an hour. He 
is almost devoid of virtuosity. I must admit 
that sometimes, in a preface, he parades the 
number of books he has read; and that we 
know he was amazed at his own talent and 
thought himself as great as Napoleon. But 
this impinging of his self-consciousness upon 
the field of his work is very rare. 

The gloom of Balzac is against him, to 
my mind; it is a weakness. If he were still 
greater than he is, he would be more cheer- 
ful. But let us consider his dark, peculiar 
mood. 

Balzac, like Dante, suffers from a lack of 
humour; but one feels the absolute benevo- 
lence of Balzac, w^hereas we know that 
Dante's benevolence is cut into by political 
hatreds and by petty theological dogmas. 
Dante is not a good fellow, but Balzac is as 
warm as the sun. The young person will 
not feel this warmth ; for Balzac's fondness 
for shadows, his love of accumulating dam- 
nations and allowing them to rain and pour 
down the pit into the infernal regions below, 

1:2493 



GREEK GENIUS 

sweeping virtuous persons along with them, 
is unpleasing and confusing to the con- 
science of the young. His almost exclusive 
interest in the forces which grind downward 
is a weakness. There are forces in the uni^ 
verse which grind upward, bringing good 
out of evil and peace out of sin. Why could 
not Balzac have given us pictures of these 
heaven-ascending and angelic powers more 
frequently than he did? Thus reasons 
youth, and I sympathise with it ; but as one 
grows older and becomes more astute, one 
perceives that there is a large element of the 
conventional, of the intellectual, of the 
purely aesthetic, in Balzac's tragedies. We 
must not weep too hard over the pains of 
the virtuous in Balzac, over the Goriots and 
the Madame Hulots— no, nor even over the 
punishment of the wicked. All these per- 
sonages are symbols, and we gradually come 
to feel more distinctly the goodness and 
purity of the great brain and the great heart 
that have set these symbols in motion. I 
suppose there does not exist in the world a 
more powerful picture of domestic infelicity 
than Balzac gives in describing the Hulot 
family in La Cousine Bette. The tragedy is 
set forth v/ith the remorselessness of mathe- 
matics and the power of Niagara. It is 
1:250 3 



BALZAC 

painful, it is horrible. One wonders how an 
author can bear to depict misery at such 
length and in such detail. But in the midst 
of the whole relation — that is to say, at 
about two hundred and fifty octavo pages 
from the beginning of the tale, and one hun- 
dred and fifty before the end— Balzac casts 
in the following sturdy, sensible, unemo- 
tional paragraph, which explains his rela- 
tion to the whole matter : 



*'Cette esquisse permet aux ames inno- 
centes de deviner les differents ravages que 
les madame Marneffe exercent dans les fa- 
milies, et par quels moyens elles atteignent 
de pauvres femmes vertueuses, en apparence 
si loin d'elles. Mais, si Ton veut transporter 
par la pensee ces troubles a I'etage superieur 
de la societe, pres du trone; en voyant ce 
que doivent avoir coute les maitresses des 
rois, on mesure I'etendue des obligations du 
peuple envers ses souverains quand ils don- 
nent I'exemple des bonnes moeurs et de la 
vie de famille." 

There is a benevolent-thinking person out- 
side the phantasmagoria of the Comedie Hu- 
inaine — and the sensibleness and bonhomie 



GREEK GENIUS 

of this great heart is what blesses the Co- 
medie. 

There is another element to be consid- 
ered. In studying the shadows in any tragic 
art we must take account of tradition. 
Achilles must die: Fate claims him. The 
child in the audience cries when he first un- 
derstands this; and the unsophisticated are 
made to suffer by the cruelties of art. The 
inhabitants of the Mediterranean, on the 
other hand, frankly enjoy tragedy, because 
they invented it; they know it is a sham, a 
mere idea-in-action. Now the French pos- 
sess a bit of coast on the Mediterranean 
which, in spite of the fun the Parisians make 
of its inhabitants, is the most important fact 
in French history, and has controlled the 
development of French art in all its forms. 
The Frenchman is a more intellectual being 
than the Saxon or the Angle. He does not 
enjoy a joke against himself, but he enjoys 
a tragedy against himself, if it is a good 
tragedy. The Comte de Segur, aide-de- 
camp to Napoleon, saw the retreat from 
Moscow with the eyes of Thucydides. 
Neither his admiration for Napoleon, on the 
one hand, nor his sorrow in France's down- 
fall, on the other, beclouds the judgment of 
the young writer. He speaks as a pure in- 

1:2523 



BALZAC 

telligence, and he perceives the magnificent 
tragic elements which ruled the entire drama 
of the retreat. In the same spirit Victor 
Hugo described Waterloo, and Zola de- 
scribed the Franco-German War. No Eng- 
lish, German, or American man of letters, 
in dealing with the misfortunes of his coun- 
try, could display an intellectual detachment 
of this sort. His self-consciousness would 
be too great, and his aesthetic interest too 
feeble, to permit of his describing a national 
catastrophe, — no matter how magnificent, — 
with artistic zeal. 

There is in Balzac a meridional feeling 
that tragedy must be tragic. If a woman is 
to sacrifice life and honour, she must not 
merely go to the brink and then be saved 
through a trick of the plot : she must go to 
the bottom. If a man is to die of drink, he 
must be reduced to the meanest attic by 
delirium tremens, and his children must beg 
their bread. There is a non-sentimental, 
workmanlike thoroughness in this march 
of evil that hurts the feelings of Anglo- 
Saxons, who cannot accept these matters 
as good symbolism and telling art, but keep 
on being sorry that Achilles must die. 

I suggest this view of Balzac's dark and 
tragic tendencies the rather that I find my- 

1:2533 



GREEK GENIUS 

self less offended by his gloom the older I 
grow. It becomes ever more clear to me 
that Balzac's melancholy is the melancholy 
of the artist, not of the cynic. It is poetic 
melancholy, and his tragedy is largely con- 
ventional, as all good tragedy ought to be. 

There is a secret about all great art, and 
the secret is as profound in the case of writ- 
ing as in the case of music. The power that 
holds us is something deeper than all expla- 
nation, than all criticism. The world con- 
tains not only death-chairs, which kill men 
through a low and alternating electric cur- 
rent, but life-chairs, which vitalise men 
through an exceedingly high and perfectly 
steady current, and the experience in each 
case is unconscious. We step into the vor- 
tex, the power is turned on, and something 
happens which controls and changes us. 

Balzac is such a life-chair. People seek 
him for various reasons. Many read him 
for the story. They plunge into the unend- 
ing romance of him, just as the mediaeval 
reader plunged into The Romaimt of the 
Rose; others read Balzac for his pictures of 
manners, or of character, or for his wise 
remarks on life. Still others read him in 
search of metaphysical ideas. These are 
often distressed by the tale and indifferent to 
1:2543 



BALZAC 

the fate of its characters ; yet they are held 
to the task of understanding it, they must 
know what Balzac is driving at. I myself 
often finish a book of Balzac's almost wish- 
ing that I had never begun it. His books 
add a new duty to life. To read one of them 
is like having a live crab entangled in one's 
hair: there is no quick way of getting him 
out. 

And yet perhaps all of these various 
kinds of readers are brothers in destiny. The 
interest of the story, the descriptions of 
manners, the philosophic appeal, are all 
merely baits that lead different men to put 
their necks into the collar, or to sit in the 
life-chair. The books begin lumberingly; 
and then, suddenly, we are caught, we are in 
the throes, we are under the waves. Our 
brains have been brought into contact with 
a big dynamic thinking apparatus which con- 
nects us with the maelstrom of infinity. 

We should use no method in dealing with 
Balzac, but should approach him through 
accident and chaotically, pulling down one 
of his books occasionally to see if it speaks 
to us. The scholars have tried to measure 
him. They have walked over his huge back 
like inch-worms. Even Sainte-Beuve, the 



GREEK GENIUS 

most liberal of the Frenchmen, tries to 
"place" Balzac. But the jug is too wide for 
the shelf : the critic is left with the sprawling 
author in his arms. 

One should not try to know one's Balzac 
nor feel any responsibility towards him. His 
merits dodge the searchlight and thereafter 
walk abroad in the dusk, like shy leopards 
with velvet feet. You cannot be sure of 
finding them or of showing them to another ; 
they are intimate and personal things. Those 
happy words, odd hints and phrases, in Bal- 
zac are part of the great unspoken, moving 
drama at the back of his mind. They live in 
a space of three dimensions, and we cannot 
get them to stick upon our flat page. 

The other day I opened the Medecin de 
Campagne with innocence, because I had 
never heard of it. During the first twenty- 
five pages I became bored, because I had 
hoped for a detective story, and the thing 
seemed to be turning into a didactic romance 
about the good citizen. I had dreadful 
recollections of Harriet Martineau's tales, 
and the teaching of economic truth through 
fiction. The scheme of the book is to sug- 
gest that a single man may transform a 
whole countryside from a wilderness to a 
paradise in the course of a few years. The 



BALZAC 

Medecin de Campagne is a saint, but a new- 
kind of saint — a social worker. I was 
browsing my way through the book when I 
came across a thought that was familiar, — 
namely, that the defective classes are a 
source of piety. 

"Admirable religion! elle a place les 
secours d'une bienfaisance aveugle pres 
d*une aveugle infortune. La ou se trouvent 
des cretins, la population croit que la pre- 
sence d'un etre de cette espece porte bonheur 
a la famille. Cette croyance sert a rendre 
douce une vie qui, dans le sein des villes, 
serait condamnee aux rigueurs d'un fausse 
philanthropic et a la discipline d'un hospice. 
Dans la vallee superieure de I'lsere, oil ils 
abondent, les cretins vivent en plein air avec 
les troupeaux qu'ils sont dresses a garder. 
Au moins sont-ils libres et respectes comme 
doit I'etre le malheur." 

This passage would have passed over me as 
a commonplace reflection, but that I hap- 
pened to be familiar with the life and writ- 
ings of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the great 
American philanthropist, who began his life 
as a Philhellene in Byron's time, became 
famous at a later date through teaching 
1:2573 



GREEK GENIUS 

deaf-mutes to read and write, and ended his 
life as the patriarch of every form of 
beneficence. Now Dr. Howe disapproved 
of confining the defective classes in institu- 
tions. He believed in leaving them with 
their families, or in farming them out among 
kind people in the country. I have read 
eloquent reports made by Dr. Howe at the 
time he was at the head of all the charities 
of Massachusetts (that is to say, about 
1865-1875), which are no more than dis- 
quisitions on the words of Balzac which I 
have quoted. Was Balzac in 1835 familiar 
with the advanced scientific theories of 
criminology which Dr. Howe put into prac- 
tice in 1875? Or did Balzac, through a 
mere act of intuition in imagining a modern 
saint, arrive at certain ideas peculiar to 
Howe, who was a typical modern saint? 
Balzac gives the elements of the modern 
citizen-saint much as a mathematician might 
give the solution of a problem. This whole 
story suggests Howe. 

Balzac seems to be able to manufacture 
humanity; he uses live creatures to state his 
thought. When you or I write an essay, a 
sermon, or a treatise, we deduce arguments 
and weave a net of ideas. All these ideas 
are portions of humanity, and could really 



BALZAC 

exist only in live men. Balzac knows this, 
and knows it so well that the ideas are not 
true to him, ideas are not ideas at all unless 
they are seen as living characters. He 
thinks in characters, as the dramatists do. 
His power of thought is so comprehensive 
that it makes things vibrate far and near. 
Before he has done with a subject the idea 
has been put into a shape where it seems to 
be an ineradicable living verity, a part of 
humanity, true for yesterday, true for Pata- 
gonia and for Massachusetts and for 1950. 

M. Faguet says very decisively that Bal- 
zac is no thinker; but that is because the 
stage of Balzac's thought is so immense that 
M. Faguet does not feel that he is in a the- 
atre at all. No one has taken his tickets. 
The Three Fatal Judges of the Underworld, 
who sit with red ribbons in the lapels of 
their evening coats in the foyer of the Fran- 
^ais, are not seen in Balzac. *'Bah!" says 
the Academicien, ''this is no theatre : it is a 
Bartholomew fair!'' 

Whether it be a fair or a theatre, the 
mimic world of Balzac is a world of symbol- 
ism, ruled by certain laws of illusion, and it 
is in his subtle handling of these laws that 
he excels. The money on the stage is never 
real; and so with all the sham doors and 
[2593 



GREEK GENIUS 

false situations in fiction— there is the magic 
of ideas in all of them, and we must leave 
this magic in its place. It will not do to 
transport a bit of the theatre or a scene out 
of a story into the actual world. We must 
not try to match up a piece of the imagina- 
tive world with its analogue in real life. 
The thing is merely a symbol, and has no 
analogue. The great creators produce in us 
an illusion of their omniscience. The poet 
is a kind of god ; the novelist seems to know 
the whole of life. Balzac appears to com- 
prehend politics, art, finance, bric-a-brac, the 
wine trade, peasant life, student life, pro- 
vincial life, the Church, — everything. He 
creates in us a most vivid belief that he un- 
derstands all things. 

But of course Balzac knew none of these 
things correctly ; he merely knew their stage 
uses, their imaginative values, their sym- 
bolic effectivenesses. It wall not do for us 
to catechise him about the Catholic Church, 
or about the Bourbon Monarchy, or about 
universal suffrage. Down to 1845 ^^ had 
never been in a law court : "je n'avais ja- 
mais entendu plaider." He wandered into 
the Cour d'Assises, and was so interested 
that he remained there all day. This ro- 
mancer who, one might say, first discovered 

1:2603 



BALZAC 

the dramatic value of the law and of law- 
suits in fiction, knows nothing of law. He 
can improvise it as fast as he needs it. Im- 
provise ? No, not quite that, but pick it out 
of a book, or a friend, or the gutter. He 
lays his hand on some old leather rag of 
reality and turns it into a king's mantle in his 
story-book. 

Balzac's Pickwickian expedition to Sar- 
dinia, which in 1838 he visited alone and in 
secret for the sake of discovering the silver- 
mines left by the Romans, exhibits more 
kinds of ignorance of the world than were 
ever brought together before. His secretive- 
ness and his cunning, his enthusiasm for 
science, his lust for gold, his fatiguing jour- 
neys, his maddening quarantines, — all the 
sufferings of the Parisian Balzac, who 
found himself ''dans un desert rempli d'in- 
connus quasi-sauvages,"— are described in 
letters which seem like screams of pain : 

"J'ai traverse une foret vierge penche sur 
le cou de mon cheval sous peine de la vie; 
car, pour la traverser, il fallait marcher dans 
un cours d'eau, convert d'un berceau de 
plantes grimpantes et de branches qui m'au- 
raient eborgne, casse les dents, emporte la 
tete. C'est des chenes verts gigantesques, 

1:260 



GREEK GENIUS 

des arbres a liege, des lauriers, des bruyeres 
de trente pieds de hauteur. Rien a manger." 

This Sardinian episode of Balzac's life, 
though it is told in only twenty pages of 
print, is as remarkable as Daudet's Tartarin 
— which, by the way, it vividly recalls. 

The passion for finance, which makes the 
money-matters in his books so real and so 
thrilling, ruined Balzac in real life. In this 
department he seems to have transplanted 
his stage beliefs into the actual world, and 
something of the same sort is true of his 
love-affairs. He had an uncertain compre- 
hension of the woman he loved. This artist, 
who knew women better than any artist 
since Euripides (I have heard young women 
declare that they generally shut all the doors 
when they sit down to read Balzac),— this 
master of the soul of women in fiction,— 
seems to have lived in a region of half-com- 
prehension with regard to Madame Hanska, 
the woman he loved for eighteen years. 

With the exception of finance and of 
Madame Hanska, he had no interest in the 
actual. His art consumed him. It trans- 
lated all actualities into fiction so fast that 
you might say that for him the world had no 
charms, no terrors. He simplified his life 

1:2623 



BALZAC 

to a mere desk in a cottage, and would have 
been completely happy but for the incursion 
of his symbolic world of finance and of his 
symbolic world of love into this cottage. 

Madame Hanska was astonished that Bal- 
zac, who knew the criminal classes so well, 
should often be a prey to sharpers. She 
asks him how it is possible that he should be 
an innocent. He pleads that fatigue and 
distraction are the cause of it, that Napoleon 
cannot be in all places at once, and so forth. 
But the real reason he does not suspect,— 
namely, that the thieves' world of fiction is 
not the real thieves' world, and that the 
great creator of criminals in fiction does not 
recognise a criminal in the street. 

This is as it must be, and we ought not to 
be astonished. Life is so complex that any 
one aspect of it is enough to occupy and 
exhaust the greatest intellect. The poet, the 
banker, the economist, the physicist has all 
he can master if he knows the dialect of his 
own province of the mind. 

The great and insoluble question with 
Balzac is, of course, the same as it is with 
Shakespeare and with Dickens, How do the 
characters get into the poet? How do Fal- 
staff and Mrs. Gamp come to exist? and do 
observation and study have much to do with 

1:263:] 



GREEK GENIUS 

the matter? There are two or three chance 
sentences in Balzac's letters which throw 
more light on the subject than all that the 
critics have said from the age of Aristotle 
downward. 

In writing to Madame Hanska, he says 
that he drew his women from his imagina- 
tion, and did not copy them from his ac- 
quaintances. He says this in answer to a 
letter in which she had evidently twitted him 
for his intimate knowledge of women, and 
called him a lady-killer. Again, to the 
Duchesse d'Abrantes, who had raised the 
same question in a wider form, he describes 
the spontaneous play of ideas that went on 
in his mind, and which made him feel like a 
bystander, and adds : 

"Ce kaleidoscope-la vient-il de ce que, 
dans Tame de ceux qui pretendent vouloir 
peindre toutes les affections et le coeur hu- 
main, le hasard jette toutes les affections 
memes, alin qu'ils puissent, par la force de 
leur imagination, ressentir ce qu'ils peignent? 
et V observation ne serait-elle qu'ime sorte de 
niemoire propre a aider cette mobile imagi- 
nation? Je commence a le croire." 

The italics are mine. Here is a statement by 

1:2643 



BALZAC 

one of the few great geniuses who are com- 
petent to speak ; and he seems to say that his 
external observation of men is merely an 
aid to his internal memory; that is, it helps 
to catch and docket the characters that seethe 
within his imagination. Perhaps this is as* 
clear a statement as we may ever expect to 
receive upon the matter. The words show 
the extent to which the external world is 
subjected to the internal in the mind of an 
artist. 

In modern times it is customary to talk 
about the "message" of an artist, but no one 
has ever discovered what the term means. 
The mind of an artist is normally a blank, 
except where his art fills it in, and those who 
create the strongest illusion of omniscience 
are probably the most completely ignorant 
of things not within their craft. Take away 
his ink-pot or his paint-box, and the artist is 
a fish out of water. His life is in the hiero- 
glyphics of his trade. This is his message ; 
this is himself. The greater the poet, the 
less is he conscious of any message, because 
the less is he aware of the actual world. He 
has transhumanised everything he knows to 
suit his own temperament. Small natures, 
who live half in the real world and half in 



GREEK GENIUS 

their own peculiar moods, are burdened with 
a sense of message. I cannot find that Bal- 
zac had any conscious message. He wanted 
fame ; he needed money ; he wrote furiously. 
The rest was consequence. The whole was 
destiny. 

There are certain critics whose forte it is 
to complain that the great masters did n't 
really know their own business. Critics of 
this sort rule the whole literature of paint- 
ing, and abound in all other literatures ; and 
it is no wonder if certain students have 
fallen foul of Balzac on the ground that he 
is not sufficiently literate. M. Faguet says 
that the novelist was not a reader. But if 
you turn to Balzac's letters you find that the 
artist had, after all, some reading. He men- 
tions Sterne, Mirabeau, La Fontaine, Rous- 
seau, de Stael, Voltaire, Richardson, Juve- 
nal, Rabelais, Goethe, Byron, etc., etc., with 
the sort of freedom that educated persons 
use; and the range of his allusions is wide. 
His historical novels and his philosophical 
romances imply reading. He owned ten 
thousand volumes, and refused to give up 
his library to his creditors on the ground that 
his books were the tools of his trade. He 
constantly asks his mother to procure par- 
ticular books for him. 

1:2663 



BALZAC 

It is, indeed, impossible for any great 
literary man not to be bookish. From 
Dante and Petrarch downward, all the great 
poets and writers have been bookish; they 
have lived on books as the seal lives on fish. 
The passion for reading is the one quality 
that great literary men have in common with 
small literary men. The difference seems to 
be that books feed the great ones and poison 
the small ones. 

Balzac is a great jongleur who draws 
upon an inexhaustible repertory of tales, 
and weaves many threads from the past into 
his great tapestries. His manner of treating 
the romance is the correct, traditional man- 
ner, which has survived from the days of 
Miletus because it is popular and agree- 
able. The genre of romance- writing per- 
mits and invites this discursive method ; and 
persons who would divide fiction into (i) 
narrative, (2) discursive, etc., are, from an 
academic point of view, entirely in the 
wrong. It is their own reading, not Balzac's 
reading that has been narrow. Balzac had 
no esthetique, — that is, he had no formula, 
—but he had practices. He did what 
Homer and Ovid and their mediaeval and 
modern successors have always done. 
Chaucer, Cervantes, Scott, and Balzac, with 

1:2673 



GREEK GENIUS 

all their discursiveness, belong to the school 
which seduces and enchants. The asides 
and excursions in Balzac interest us as much 
as the story. And besides, they are a part 
of the story; they are swirling portions of 
the great river. 

As the "message" of the artist must be 
left in limbo, so the "philosophy" of a poet 
ought to be liberally treated. In dealing 
with it we must content ourselves with allu- 
sions — pointing to the thought, but never 
attempting to extract, define, or reproduce 
it. We are all in search of the poet's idea— 
we who read his books and feel his power. 
Every work of art carries a philosophy in 
its hand. There is a metaphysic even in 
Shakespeare and Walter Scott; and there 
is in Balzac a far more approachable mode 
of thought than in either of these. 

When Balzac was in his teens, he had 
visions of becoming a philosopher. He 
wrote a Theorie de la Volonte, which, to 
his lasting regret, was burned by an ignorant 
teacher. He mourned the loss, for he 
thought that this early work would have 
shown the world what talents he had in the 
field of metaphysics. Nevertheless, as he 
turned from philosophy to romance, as he 
dropped the ferule and took up the wand, the 

1:2683 



BALZAC 

Theorie de la Volonte still haunted his 
thought. There is an ever-present meta- 
physic in Balzac, a thing peculiar to his 
mind, and unitary; that is to say, consistent 
with itself, philosophical. It is a general 
conception of life as force, and of the vis- 
ible portions of our being as mere projec- 
tions of the far larger and more important 
invisible parts. This conception is what 
gives brilliancy, transparency, enduring 
power to his fiction. In the author's mind 
the externals are mere lenses, reflecting sur- 
faces, reverberations which voice an invis- 
ible drama that is conducted by the gods 
above. The life lies behind and beyond. 
The future is always present, and the past is 
present; the story is a philosophical ro- 
mance. 

This point of view is conveyed by a thou- 
sand hints, and sometimes by discourses, as 
in the Peau de Chagrin, in Le Cousin Pons 
(the discourse on fortune-telling), in the 
Recherche de VAhsolu, etc., etc. The 
thought itself can live only in a half-light, 
and Balzac is happiest in dealing with it by 
asides. When he becomes dogmatic and 
heavy,— as, for instance, in Seraphita and 
in Louis Lambert,— when he determines to 
be a philosopher and swears he will force 



GREEK GENIUS 

his idea down the throat of the world, he 
becomes deadly and inexpressive. Good 
Lord, deliver us from him ! 

But the mysticism of Balzac, when it ap- 
pears as a mere illumination due to vision— 
like the aura of the saints— is the divine 
power in him, divinely working, divinely 
seeing. The introduction by him of this ele- 
ment—I should say the perception by him of 
this element — at work in the midst of the 
most real realism, the realism invented by 
the father of realism, is what gives its char- 
acter to the Comedie Humaine. 

In his great tragic romances the track of 
some mighty egoism is followed across so- 
ciety. Ambition, avarice, envy, misguided 
love, unbridled sensuality, are so depicted 
that we feel them to be the visitations of 
madness, foci of inscrutable, compelling 
force, which wreck the lives of many and 
ravage the world like a disease. Not since 
Shakespeare's two or three greatest trage- 
dies has there been any human writing so 
powerfully and completely tragic as these 
books. They leave us with a sense of real- 
ity with which no fiction competes. 

These great tragedies are merely monu- 
ments which stand out in the city of Balzac's 
literature. They themselves differ greatly 

1^702 



BALZAC 

from one another, and cannot be reduced to 
a formula, for each one of them is vitalised 
by a principle which is peculiar to itself. 
The merits of the lesser works are also so 
interwoven with their substance that criti- 
cism cannot name them exactly. Life leaps 
from the pages— that is all we know. 

The Peau de Chagrin is a book full of 
longueurs; but it contains an unforgettable 
idea, and the story passes from plain tale 
into allegory and back again without transi- 
tion. The story glows and throbs with 
truth, because life also vibrates between the 
actual and the metaphysical. The most 
solid houses are constantly melting into mist 
as we gaze on them. How often do we see 
sky and sea, hopes, dreams, and fears, shine 
through the solid masonry about us ! Things 
good and bad, great and small, get at us 
through the bars and bonds of time. In Bal- 
zac everything glows; there is a glamour 
and a novelty about his scenes which are like 
the hopes of youth and the foretaste of hap- 
piness. Everything is thrilling, rich, clear, 
certain, and inevitable. The Arabian Nights 
are not more satisfying to the romantic ap- 
petite. You feel the completeness of the 
tale; you repose in its fatality from the be- 
ginning. To what extent are his stories 



GREEK GENIUS 

spontaneous, to what extent arranged? I 
do not know. But I know that they are 
studied things, Hke good music ; they are ar- 
tificial, symboHc things; they are abstrac- 
tions ; there is algebra concealed in them. 

Like all powerful forms of art, these tales 
are complex centres where many and various 
kinds of force converge and are superposed 
one upon the other. The same tale often 
has the interest of a detective story, of a 
melodrama, an allegory, a picture of man- 
ners, and of a personal letter from Balzac. 
This multiplicity of content is what makes a 
writer great, for it is a quality which we do 
not outgrow. If we tire of the theme, we 
enjoy the construction. At twenty we love 
the villain, at forty the epilogue. This com- 
plexity of idea is what gives to any work 
the quality of pure intellect. 

To take an example: the Russian novels 
are much simpler in content than Balzac's 
novels. They are exhaustible : we tire of 
them. They are written by men whose 
minds have not been subdued by the classic 
traditions of Western Europe ; by men who 
are not hooped in and controlled by conven- 
tional aesthetic standards. The Russian 
novels do not contain a tincture of the Ara- 
bian Nights, and of Boccaccio, and of 



BALZAC 

Clarissa Harlowe, as Balzac does. They 
lack a hundred elements which go to make 
up fiction. The art that soothes us, makes 
us happy, gives us the truth, is the art that 
conveys an abstraction and leaves no prob- 
lem behind. 

Mere pictures of manners and of politics, 
mere moralities and economic tales, mere 
social studies, no matter how true or how 
deserving, are parts of the raw material of 
life. They belong to the crude ore which 
we all have to deal with in our own work- 
shops. I am not willing to give my painful 
attention to reading a novel if the book is 
only a restatement of lifers injustices and 
incongruities, a mere attack on the incom- 
prehensibility of the universe. I must have 
something that gives me a clue or a sense of 
solution, something that confirms the faith 
in me which the real world so constantly 
baffles. This is what great works of art do 
for us. 

It is a wonderful proof of the ultimate 
identity of comedy and tragedy that Balzac, 
whom most people would name as the great- 
est modern tragedian, was in his person the 
very ideal of a comic poet. He was the god 
Pan in the flesh. His lips curved, his brow 
bulged, his eyes gleamed, his fingers played 

1:2733 



GREEK GENIUS 

the pipe. There were reeds in his hair; his 
garments were mere drapery; his good hu- 
mour and natural honour, and his in- 
exhaustible fountains of life, courage, 
benevolence, deluged those who saw him, 
and live yet in the pictures of him and in his 
letters, which add the last and greatest fig- 
ure to Balzac's gallery, — to wit, the figure 
of Balzac himself. 

The externals of this deity are as simple 
as those of some demigod to whom the 
decorative arts have assigned but one sym- 
bol. Balzac's symbol is a dressing-gown. 
He has no home, family, wife, fortune, cir- 
cle, career, or periods of life. He got into 
debt in his early youth, and remained in debt. 
He changed his lodgings, but never his 
mind. His temperament added to his debt 
faster than his talent could diminish it ; and 
so it went— more debt, more fiction— till the 
end. 

Balzac was born in Tours in 1799, and at 
twelve years of age moved to Paris with his 
family. He died in 1850, having written 
about a hundred books, large and small. He 
was a short, stout man with a beaming face 
and nature,— beaming, that is, except when 
he was in the glooms from exhaustion and 

1:274:1 



BALZAC 

overwork. His manner of life and his 
method of composition are deeply related to 
his art. They were the habits of the bril- 
liant crammer, who sits up all night with a 
wet towel round his head, and does the work 
of a half-year in twelve hours. Only with 
Balzac the work began at midnight and 
lasted till five o'clock on the following after- 
noon ; and the regime was kept up for sev- 
eral months at a time. As for food, he ate 
when he pleased, except that he seems to 
have dined regularly and dined early. This 
way of life did not result in killing him till 
he was fifty-one, because, in the first place, 
he had the strongest constitution imaginable, 
and secondly, because he had no dissipa- 
tions, used no drugs or alcohol, his only 
vice being black coffee, which occasionally 
he would forswear. It must be observed, 
also, as a thing of the very greatest impor- 
tance, that his sleeping hours were the early 
hours of the night— from seven to twelve. 

In 1838, after this outrageous regime had 
been in operation for ten or twelve years, he 
writes : 

"Comrae j 'avals ete vingt-cinq jours sans 
dormir, je suis, depuis un mois, occupe a 
dormir quinze ou seize heures par jour et a 

[275: 



GREEK GENIUS 

ne rien faire pendant les huit heures de 
vieille; je me refais de la cervelle pour la 
depenser a mesure qu'elle vient." 

This power of sleep is proof that Balzac's 
nature was still intact. 

The way of life, however, made a recluse 
of him. He had the concentration, the men- 
tal isolation of an astronomer. His original 
qualities,— his ingenuousness, his unworld- 
liness, were no doubt intensified by his seclu- 
sion. As a boy he shut himself up to work 
off a debt, and at the age of fifty-one he 
walked out of his study into his grave, and 
had lost none of his ideals. 

The privacy of his life had, I believe, a 
good deal to do with this retention of his 
youth, both in a good sense and a bad one. 
He was an ingenuous, high-strung creature. 
The following passage is not a page from 
Goethe's Wert her, nor a page out of the 
diary of an ingenue in one of George Sand's 
romances. It is part of a letter written by 
Balzac, at the age of thirty-nine, to Madame 
Hanska, whom he had known in Vienna 
some years before. He writes from Milan : 

"Je suis alle a la poste pour savoir si 
quelqu'un aurait eu I'idee de m'ecrire poste 

n2763 



BALZAC 

restante. J'ai trouve une lettre de la com- 
tesse Thiirhein, qui vous aimait tant et que 
vous aimiez aussi, et ou votre nom etait pro- 
nonce au milieu d'une phrase melancolique 
qui m'a emu profondement; . . . Je me 
suis assis sur un banc et suis reste pres d'une 
heure les yeux attaches sur le Duomo, fas- 
cine par tout ce que cette lettre rappelait. Et 
tons les incidents de mon sejour a Vienne 
ont passe devant moi dans toute leur verite 
naive, dans toute leur candeur de marbre. 
Ah! que ne doit-on pas, je ne dis pas a 
celle qui nous cause de si douces et pures 
souvenances, mais au fragile papier qui les 
reveille." 

This passage may be taken as the keystone 
in the long arch of his passion for her, which 
began in 1833 and ended only with his life. 

This retirement and perpetual contempla- 
tion kept the bloom on his feelings, yet it 
kept him also in prey to his moods. To- 
wards the end of his life he became more 
and more excessive in his exaltations and in 
his depressions. The insanity of the lover, 
which is pleasing in the boy of nineteen, 
gives us concern in the man of fifty. Balzac 
thinks of his mistress every hour ; he walks 

1:2773 



GREEK GENIUS 

into churches and kneels before altars and 
prays for her ; she is his eyer-present deity. 

In 1846 he receives a cruel letter. Its early 
pages cause him so much anguish that, drop- 
ping it unfinished, he rushes up the Rue de 
Rivoli in his summer shoes, though the snow 
is ankle-deep. His aspect alarms what 
friends he meets. He plods the boulevards 
all day, and, returning exhausted to his 
home in Passy at ten o'clock at night, he 
flings himself into bed. But sleep deserts 
his eyelids. He therefore rises, lights his 
fire as well as the fifty candles of his bronze 
chandelier, and proceeds to finish the letter, 
whose balmy final passages somewhat as- 
suage the sufferings which its earlier pages 
have caused. 

A man of this kind is a good lover but a 
bad companion, and we must regard it as 
fortunate that circumstances compelled him 
to live apart from the object of his adora- 
tion, except for the many journeys taken 
together and the many visits which the lov- 
ers paid to each other in Poland and in 
France. One feels convinced that there was 
less suffering in Balzac's life than if his 
marriage with Madame Hanska had taken 
place at an earlier date. 

The negative portrait of this woman 

n 278:1 



BALZAC 

which comes to us out of Balzac's letters to 
her is not reassuring. We get an impression 
that she was at times bored by his assidui- 
ties, that she sometimes played upon his feel- 
ings, that she made use of him to collect 
autographs, that she was somehow a vulgar- 
minded person. We must not forget, how- 
ever, that she completely satisfied Balzac^s 
romanticism and perfected his life, and that 
she finally did, in obedience to Russian law, 
give up her fortune in order to marry him. 
Her husband died in 1841 : she married Bal- 
zac in 1850. 

A disillusionment of some sort seems to 
have fallen upon the lovers soon after their 
marriage; both of them were no longer 
young, and both were very ill. Certainly 
their wedding journey from Poland to Paris 
is one of the saddest in history. 

I should be content if not quite so many 
of Balzac's letters to Madame Hanska had 
survived. A liaison carried on by corre- 
spondence, which continues for eighteen 
years, becomes an integral part of two lives. 
The people become necessary to each other, 
and this fact is more important than any- 
thing which they say in their letters. The 
letters are the ceaseless drumming of the 
mill-wheels of life. 



GREEK GENIUS 

Your complete literary man writes all the 
time. It wakes him in the morning to write, 
it exercises him to write, it rests him to 
write. Writing is to him a visit from a 
friend, a cup of tea, a game of cards, a walk 
in the country, a warm bath, an after-dinner 
nap, a hot Scotch before bed, and the sleep 
that follows it. Your complete literary chap 
is a writing animal; and when he dies he 
leaves a cocoon as large as a haystack, in 
which every breath he has drawn is recorded 
in writing. We must place these cocoons in 
our cabinet, but we need not label them with 
very lofty names, even though some great 
butterflies have flown out of them. There 
are men and women, great and small, who 
have left a wilderness of memorials behind 
them. We feel that we should know them 
better if we did not know so much about 
them. The Carlyles were distinguished fig- 
ures before their memoirs were published. 
Balzac's letters to Madame Hanska belong 
to this crushing class, w^hich here encloses, 
as it often does, an enormous interest. The 
interest in this case comes from discovering 
that all we had guessed about Balzac in read- 
ing the novels is proved to be true by the 
letters. 

There is no night side to Balzac's life or 



BALZAC 

nature— a thing which the world has been 
slow to believe. Most great sentimentalists, 
like Goethe, Byron, de Musset, have at one 
time or another been dissipated men, a thing 
which shows in their philosophy and in their 
artistic work. Balzac seems to have had no 
period of dissipation. I do not mean that 
he was irreproachably virtuous, but that he 
retained throughout life an innocence of 
feeling which is foreign to Gallic sentiment. 
At the risk of making the reader laugh, I 
must give a portion of an indignant letter 
which Balzac writes in 1832 to one of his 
oldest friends, Madame Carraud, who had 
suggested to him a worldly marriage : 

"Comme vous me jugez mal en croyant 
que je ne saurais pas m'abimer dans Taffec- 
tion que vous me depeignez virile et en me 
condamnant a la femme que vous supposez 
etre ici, que vous peignez a votre gre ! Vous 
avez ete injuste dans bien des appreciations. 
Moi, vendu a un parti pour une femme ! un 
homme chaste pendant un an! . . . Vous 
n'y songez pas : une ame qui ne congoit pas 
la prostitution! qui regarde comme enta- 
chant tout plaisir qui ne derive pas et ne 
retourne pas a Tame! Oh! vous me devez 
des reparations. Je n'ai pas eu les pensees 

1:280 



GREEK GENIUS 

que vous me pretez. J'ai horreur de tout ce 
qui est seduction, parce que c'est quelque 
chose d'etranger au sentiment vrai, pur." 

This foreign, Teutonic sentimentahty about 
the domestic relations has an influence in 
separating Balzac from France. French- 
men, as a rule, do not like it, they do not 
respond to it: it lacks pungency (except 
when exaggerated into candy a I'usage des 
jeunes filles). This sentimentality goes 
with the rest of Balzac's wallowing, exag- 
gerated nature. Good form frowns upon so 
much personal feeling, so much unrestrained 
emotion, as is everywhere prevalent in Bal- 
zac. 

There is a note all through his novels 
which rarely sounds in French literature — a 
note of piety, purity, and belief in innocence. 
Imitations of this note abound. The imita- 
tion is the aria which almost every French 
author, from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (in- 
deed, from the author of Aucassin et Nico- 
lette) down to Zola and Anatole France, 
feels bound to play on some magic flute, 
which each of them borrows for a moment 
from a bystander. But alas ! they generally 
force the note, for lack of familiarity with 
the delicate instrument. How different are 



BALZAC 

the young girls of Balzac from the ingenues 
of Alfred de Musset! There is a warmth 
and a calm in them, a good sense, a weight, 
and a glowing unconsciousness which is 
more Dutch than French, and which the 
French resent. To the French temperament 
all this side of Balzac's art seems a little flat, 
a little disgusting. 

And yet this power of depicting youth and 
goodness is the result of immense force, 
natural goodness and intellect. Such a pic- 
ture as Balzac draws of the early life of 
Josephine Claes in the Recherche de FAbsolu 
can be drawn only by a man whose soul lives 
in the love of innocence. Balzac has the 
feelings of youth and the clairvoyance of 
later life. In his pictures of the poor and 
the unfortunate there is the same depth of 
feeling. When we reflect that this is the 
author who is chiefly remembered as the 
creator of bad characters, we get an impres- 
sion of the scope of his talents. 

Balzac's first grand passion was for Ma- 
dame de Berny, a woman much older than 
himself, who had had eight children, and 
whom many people think was the best friend 
he ever had. Her death took place some 
time after his affair with Madame Hanska 
had begun, yet it seems to have smitten him 

1:2833 



GREEK GENIUS 

with the sort of sharp grief that a child feels 
on learning of the death of its mother. 

Both the novels and the letters show us in 
Balzac a man who is sentimentally constant, 
romantically domestic. His ambition and 
his sense of honour are tinged with romance. 
He refused money from his friends at the 
time he needed it most. He was determined 
to triumph by himself. He would not cede 
the manuscript of one of his novels to Prince 
Metternich, though the request for it was 
made with delicacy, because he conceived 
that a manuscript was a sacred personal 
thing which should be given only to a friend 
or a lover. 

His letters are the most affectionate let- 
ters in existence,— always to a small circle 
of friends and family,— ever the same circle. 
I give a short paragraph which summarises 
a whole sheaf of these letters : 

"Va! si Dieu me prete vie, j'aurai une 
belle place et nous serons tous heureux-, 
rions done encore, ma bonne sceur, la maison 
Balzac triomphera! Crie-le bien fort avec 
moi pour que la Fortune nous entende, et, 
pour Dieu ! encore une f ois ne te tourmente 
pas!" 

[2843 



BALZAC 

This cheerful courage is the prevailing mood 
of his temperament. He became a notabil- 
ity in 1827 with the Choiians, and remained 
a star in Paris, especially to all foreigners 
there; but these things meant little to him. 
He refused to wait over a week in Berlin, 
where the court society was ready to fete 
hini. He was bored by the heartlessness of 
drawing-room life, as appears so clearly in 
his books. On the other hand, he was 
neither a man's man nor a sport. His club 
friends were agreeable but not necessary to 
him; and we must remember also that the 
peculiar divisions of his day and night made 
social life impossible, though they worked 
in admirably with his habits of hiding from 
debt. 

As for those debts of which we hear so 
much, they resulted from the hopefulness of 
his temperament and from his weakness in 
finance. This kind of man is ever being 
tempted to shake off debt through specula- 
tion. He sees gold-mines everywhere. I 
give the following as a sample of Balzac's 
hopefulness. He has purchased a small 
pied-a-terre at Ville d'Avray. It was called 
Les Jardies. 



GREEK GENIUS 

"Aussi, grace a cette circonstance, les 
Jardies ne seront jamais une folic, et leur 
prix un jour sera double. J'ai la valeur d'un 
arpent, termine au midi par une terrasse de 
cent cinquante pieds et entoure de murs. II 
n'y a encore rien de plante; mais, cet au- 
tomne, je compte faire de ce petit coin de 
terre un £den de plantes, de senteurs et d'ar- 
bustes. A Paris et aux environs, on obtient 
tout ce qu'on veut en ce genre, pourvu qu'on 
ait de quoi le payer. J'aurai des magnolias 
de vingt ans, des tilleuls de seize ans, de 
grands peupliers, de grands bouleaux rap- 
portes avec leurs mottes, du chasselas venu 
dans des paniers pour etre recolte dans Fan- 
nee. Oh ! cette civilisation est admirable ! 
veritablement, si la paix et la prosperite pro- 
gressive de ce regne continuent sous les 
regnes suivants, on ne saurait prevoir a quel 
degre de bien-etre et de beatitude materielle 
atteindra ce bienheureux pays, surtout si les 
circonstances n'entravent pas la marche de 
la nature, qui I'a traite avec une si maternelle 
predilection. Aujourd'hui, mon terrain est 
nu comme la main ; au mois de mai prochain, 
ce sera surprenant." 

The sympathetic reader will have foreseen 
and forewept the sequel. Within a month 

1:286] 



BALZAC 

the garden walls at Les Jardies fell down 
because they had been built without founda- 
tions; and within two years the property 
was sold and became to Balzac a memory of 
pain. He begs even his beloved Madame 
Hanska never to refer to it. 

The love of luxury and the passion for 
bric-a-brac, which we all connect with Bal- 
zac, were peculiar, imaginative passions. 
Bric-a-brac fed his mind. It was the ro- 
mance of history to him, and meant to him 
the social life of past ages, the essence of 
romantic association. Cathedrals and ruined 
castles spoke to him not more powerfully 
than bureaux, pictures, bits of carving, and 
Italian stuffs. His forte, his special talent, 
one of his great sources of power, lay in his 
understanding of the trappings of life. In 
lodging and furnishing his characters he 
makes their bedsteads and clothes, their cur- 
tains, carpets, and wall-papers, speak as 
eloquently as their lips. The meaning of 
furniture was one of his discoveries; he 
draws orchestral voices out of it. What 
wonder, then, that such a man should value 
those magnificent orchestrations of the great 
costumed ages of the past? 

But Balzac had no taste for luxury. The 
few objects with which he fed his fancy 

1:2873 



GREEK GENIUS 

were, till the close of his life, like the ances- 
tral bibelots of the mandarin— things to be 
worshipped while he was living in small 
apartments and having in a cook twice a 
week to boil some beef, which he ate cold at 
every meal till her next visit. He did, it is 
true, commit the folly of buying and fur- 
nishing a house to receive Madame Hanska, 
but this was a sentimental extravagance, a 
mistake, a grotesque, imaginative folly, 
rather than an act of luxury. He seems 
really to have had no taste for luxury, except 
as a sort of revel. He enjoyed a coloured 
dressing-gown of an Asiatic cut, which was 
given him in Russia, and walked up and 
down in it with the glee of a child. 

These things show the eccentricities of a 
man of genius, but show no taste for luxury. 
In his books there is an Oriental delight in 
excess, there are descriptions of feasts in 
which waste and delirious superflux of sen- 
sation disgust us with pleasure. There is 
extravagance here, bad taste, perhaps; but 
do not call this luxury. The luxurious man 
spends twenty francs on his dinner, or buys 
a handsome waistcoat. Balzac has not two 
coats to his back, but writes furiously in a 
monk's robe. 

His burly image is engraved upon our 

1:2883 



BALZAC 

imaginations. Balzac the solitary, detached, 
prolific, indomitable creator has become one 
of those presiding geniuses whose busts 
crown the library of the mind. Volition has 
little to do with our acceptance of these 
worthies. Their names have significance 
for all men, because all men— even those 
who know nothing of them beyond the name 
— have been reached and influenced by them. 



t^^i 



IV 



LA VIE PARISIENNE 

'II faut avoir ni foyer ni patrie pour rester d Paris." 

— Balzac. 



THE WOMEN 

I BEGIN with the women, because I am 
writing this essay in the hope of saving a 
favourite niece, who thinks of making a 
plunge into the vortex of Paris. Her im- 
pulse seems to be due to an illusion that she 
has artistic talents. 

The clever woman who is born in Amer- 
ica and craves excitement without having 
the vigour to be emotional, finds herself in 
Paris as easily as the young silk-worm, on 
emerging from the egg, finds himself sitting 
on a mulberry leaf and prepared to begin his 
breakfast. The worm has bitten his way 
through the leaf and sits on top. 

The novelists have given us pictures of 
the climbing American girl — pictures perhaps 
too dark, yet true in the main. They show 
that by the mere instinct of climbing, or the 
mere passion for excitement, a certain type 
of American woman finds herself in Paris. 
These novels often come from the hands of 
[293] 



GREEK GENIUS 

the women themselves, and show a great 
mastery over one side of the subject. 
They depict with unchristian gusto the 
moral degeneration of the characters. They 
seem to be punishing the children of their 
own imaginations, as if the creatures 
were their personal enemies. The general 
tendency of social fiction has of late years 
been towards this sort of cruelty, and 
enough has never been said in extenuation 
of the faults of the American heroines, or 
indeed in explanation of the whole phenom- 
enon of those wingless women who sit 
crunching mulberry leaves in Paris. They 
are maids who have been starved at home; 
they have been bored, they have been left 
unsatisfied by the social amenities of Amer- 
ica. And from infancy they have struggled 
and fought, and sought, and tasted, and 
pushed blindly up until, at last, they have 
reached Colombin's cakes, Louis XV decora- 
tions, the titillation of refined conversation; 
in short, tons les agrements de la vie. Here 
in Paris is the elegance which they longed 
for in their cradles— chairs that rest them, 
sensibility that understands them, a new and 
not too great excitement for each hour of 
the day : the trees in the spring, the hats in 
the shop windows, the latest book, the latest 



LA VIE PARISIENNE 

genteel gentleman with something to say 
that is full of interest (he has seen a balloon, 
he knows the Swedish ambassador, he is a 
complete knight and a delightful, educated, 
romantic European). 

There is something that Paris gives to the 
American woman whose domesticity is un- 
satisfactory which nothing in heaven or 
earth can replace— not religion, not love, 
not ambition, not care for the children of 
her womb, not the memory of scenes of her 
childhood, not old friends : nothing but the 
feeling of beautiful Paris goes quite to the 
right spot in this American female. 

Of course there are differences in quality 
and in the refinement of taste among these 
enraptured children of Eve. The coarse- 
minded and uneducated find the pang of the 
poison in lace and diamonds ; the refined and 
educated find it in the phrases and nuances 
of the drawing-room life. It is a fact, how- 
ever, that a specific psychological relation 
exists between these women and this city. 
This is what makes the whole matter a fair 
subject for examination and analysis, for 
prayer and meditation, for uplift and re- 
form, for record and historic commemora- 
tion. 

Surely mankind may draw some lesson 



GREEK GENIUS 

from a devout study of these acknowledged 
mysteries. The great thing would be to 
find out what happens to these pleasure-seek- 
ing females at the turning-point; that is to 
say, at the very moment when they reach 
Paris. They must, of course, do something 
different from what they did before reach- 
ing Paris, for Paris is the top , once Paris is 
reached, there is nowhere to go but down. 
This must cause some sort of convulsion in 
their silken natures. I assume, of course, 
that each one has got to the top of her own 
particular Paris, whether it be in a restau- 
rant or in French salons. What happens 
when the worm reaches her limit and further 
climbing is positively impossible ? Does she 
go round and round ? Does she get thinner 
or fatter ? Does she go into a doze and spin ? 
My belief is that when she strikes her limit 
she begins to die. Thereafter the refine- 
ments become a habit, their pleasure-giving 
power of course diminishes. She is now a 
complete product of the American colony. 
Desiccation and contraction gradually re- 
duce her to the paper-doll condition which is 
familiar to us all. 

Another interesting study would be to de- 
termine whether a w^oman has ever been 
saved from the fate of Paris. Has a lover 

1:296] 



LA VIE PARISIENNE 

or a son ever plunged through the fire and 
brought one back ahve, set her by an Amer- 
ican fireside, interested her in her children's 
fate, warmed her back to such a point of 
vigour that the coarse blasts of American 
life could blow upon her soul and feed her 
within ? The novelists have never imagined 
such a rescue, aiid the thing is probably very 
rare. 

Still another point to be determined would 
be whether this Paris disease is congenital 
(which I rather believe), or depends upon 
circumstances. Given the American girl 
with such and such a percentage of passion, 
so much brains, so much education, so much 
money : does not the rest follow inevitably, 
just as the tadpole grows into a frog and not 
into a lion ? And might not some extremely 
great doctor in North Adams, Massachu- 
setts, as he examines a new-born female in- 
fant and holds the little worm to the light, 
wrinkle his brow, think deeply, take off his 
glasses, and say impressively the single 
word, "Paris"? 

There is an innocence about these fellow- 
countrywomen of ours to whom this essay 
is dedicated, somewhat like the innocence of 
a man who has a paper attached to his coat- 
tail without being aware of it, or the inno- 
1^972 



GREEK GENIUS 

cence of the drunkard, or the innocence of 
the self-reHant strong man who cannot be 
fooled, and whom his wife fools and man- 
ages till the audience which ought to be 
amused is tempted to feel pity. They hang 
like leeches on French civilisation, so visible 
are they, so detached, so peculiar, so much 
a class by themselves, so eccentric, so exotic, 
so artificial. And yet they are of all people 
in the world the most convinced that their 
feet are on solid ground, that they under- 
stand life, that they know the meaning of 
nationality, that they hold the secrets of the 
intellect. Every breath of breeze that fans 
them thinner and dries them harder brings 
to them a new sensation of robustness and 
succulence. Every light that makes them 
look like caricatures makes them feel like 
well-grounded and central personalities. 

The change that comes over them when 
they reach their zenith is unconscious. Death 
is unconscious — and the decadence of the 
spirit is always unconscious. The conscious 
part of life is the awakening, the being born, 
the growing, the becoming sensitive to wider 
forms of truth; and exceedingly unpleasant 
it generally is. One would never go to Paris 
to gain this experience, though one would 
willingly go there to escape from it. 



LA VIE PARISIENNE 

The Psychology of Pleasure and Pain: 
this is the great subject which our study of 
the American woman in Paris leads up to. 
What is the injury that some pleasures do 
to us? What kinds of pleasure are to be 
looked upon askance? What element in 
pleasure is it that hurts the intellect? for 
there exists some such element. Some kinds 
of pleasure injure the intellect in the very 
moment that they seem to increase its ac- 
tivity,— opium, for instance, and many other 
drugs,— special stimulations, which give in- 
tense pleasure in specific areas of the con- 
sciousness. The most powerful that I can 
think of at the moment is the excitation of 
vanity. I had rather that a man take a dose 
of opium than a dose of vanity, so far as his 
mind is concerned. Vanity is a cutting 
poison that destroys portions of a man's na- 
ture, as vitriol burns flesh ; and vanity is one 
of the intensest pleasures of which the hu- 
man heart is capable. The same is true of a 
great rage. Indeed, the artificial stimulants 
which heighten an enjoyment of life, such as 
whiskey and tobacco, and seem to harm us 
in ways that medicine reaches easily, have 
strong rivals in those purely psychological 
excitements which damage us in ways that 
medical science cannot reach. Perhaps the 



GREEK GENIUS 

psychological effect is what does the injury 
in both cases. 

My only point here is that there are inno- 
cent-seeming occupations which give the 
most thrilling joy and which do our minds 
the most desperate injury,— occupations that 
kill the very nerves of life. 

These American women whom fate has 
thrown into a class by themselves, and whom 
for half a century we have been able to 
study as they passed through various stages 
of moral decay, are plainly the victims of 
some sort of injurious pleasure. It must be 
pleasure that hurts them, because they them- 
selves confess that pleasure is their reason 
for living in Paris ; pleasure is their aim in 
life, pleasure they get. This pleasure must 
be injurious, for behold its work ! 



II 

WICKED, LOVELY PARIS 

Before taking up the cases of these ill- 
starred women, let us say a few words about 
Paris itself. The whole world, not America 
only, needs to be inoculated against the 
charms of that city. She has ruined genera- 
tions of English people. She destroys the 
[300] 



LA VIE PARISIENNE 

Turk, the South American, the Russian, the 
West Indian, the Persian. There is some- 
thing about her so free, so agreeable, so ca- 
pable of satisfying the humour of everyone, 
so sensible, so clever, so unspoiled, so un- 
sophisticated, that not to have seen Paris is 
not to have lived at all. The side streets are 
as interesting as the streets of little-known, 
remote Italian towns. The neat squares and 
distances are the most beautiful in the world. 
For a franc you get a touch of magic ; it may 
be in a spear of asparagus, or in a glimpse of 
the roof of the Louvre. Paris is the Arabian 
Nights, we must admit it. We have all 
known the glamour and the joy. 

The experience, however, wears thin for 
most people. The man with a life and a 
country of his own goes back to them gladly 
after shorter and shorter visits to Paris. He 
gets from Paris, perhaps, a whiff of the 
past, a note of his own romantic early feel- 
ings, a breath of beauty old and new. But 
he is content to leave. He flees it, in fact; 
it palls. It sends him back eager for all that 
it cannot give and has never given, except to 
Frenchmen. 

Now the victims of Paris are persons 
who never get their second wind; they are 
keeled over again and again, and as fast as 



GREEK GENIUS 

they stagger to their feet they are felled 
again by some unseen power of her charms. 
The lotus, the lotus ! here doth it bloom in- 
deed ! The devil of the place is that it is so 
easy to get to. If it were Bagdad, and no 
railways existed, it would seduce but a few 
rich epicureans whom the world could well 
spare ; but Paris takes up the ordinary Lon- 
don nobleman, or the New York millionaire, 
and it draws to its heart of loadstone the 
fluttering non-maternity of all countries. 

For Americans Paris is merely the focal, 
burning point of the general attraction which 
Europe normally exerts upon their simple 
natures. We in America are children of 
European civilisation, and Europe is our 
home. Of course we are delighted at find- 
ing everything so well done, so old, so cheap, 
so thrilling as everything is. When an 
American goes to Europe he is a rustic on a 
visit to the metropolis. It would be a dis- 
grace to us if we were not enchanted with 
the sights and sounds of the Old World. 
And indeed no one can complain of us in 
this respect. The American child, when he 
sees Europe, gets a new impression of his 
whole human inheritance. 



1:3023 



LA VIE PARISIENNE 
III 

THE DAMNED 

The Americans who become so bewitched 
with the Old World as to reside in it may be 
rightly divided into three classes: Vul- 
garians, Natural Nobles, and the Inner Tem- 
ple. The Vulgarians are those who frankly 
like the good things of the world, and find 
they get more for their money in Europe 
than at home. The Natural Nobles are 
those Americans who discern in themselves 
a kindred natal aristocracy which binds them 
to Europe. They feel as if they had been 
changed at birth and were really European 
persons of family, with coats of arms, good 
accents, and men-servants. They cannot re- 
member a time when they did not feel like 
fine ladies and gentlemen. They hold the 
hands of the real nobles very tightly when 
they meet them, and look in their eyes very 
lovingly. They are really long-lost brothers 
to dukes and kings, to barons, and to persons 
with old names and good manners,— indeed, 
to almost anyone who has the run of the 
great houses or small houses where the 
sacred society of refined and titled Europe 
1:3033 



GREEK GENIUS 

congregates. A holy smell, as of incense, 
pervades the habitations of the elect in Eu- 
rope; a gentle radiation of influence causes 
the Natural Noble from America to purr and 
raise his back and rub himself against the 
knees of the great,— yea, even against the 
chairs and wainscoting. 

The Inner Temple consists of the intellec- 
tuals. These are people who, in the way of 
books and letters, pictures, small talk, and 
parlour education, find themselves happy in 
Europe and unhappy in America. They are 
often staunch democrats in social sympathy, 
but they melt before the finesse of European 
cultivation. Crudity is their bugbear. 

It will be seen that all of these classes run 
into one another, and are really portions of 
a sort of spiral hierarchy, made up of Amer- 
icans who are sensitive towards the refine- 
ments of (i) cookery, (2) social manners, 
and (3) aesthetic expression. The Vul- 
garians are the most robust of the three 
classes, for they proclaim the lowness of 
their aims, and they frankly enjoy contact 
with one another. They are the tiers etat, 
the good bourgeoisie of the American Col- 
ony. These bourgeois are, of course, de- 
spised by the Natural Nobles, whose illusion 
it is that they themselves associate only with 
1:304] 



LA VIE PARISIENNE 

foreigners. The Vulgarians are especially 
unpleasant to them, because the Vulgarians 
are in their way; the Vulgarians are a re- 
proach to them, a travesty of them. The 
Vulgarians make the path of the Natural 
Nobles difficult in Europe in a thousand 
ways. Often a Natural Noble has sisters 
and brothers who are Vulgarians ; for Natu- 
ral Nobility is a personal sanctification, an 
illumination, a grace rather than an inherit- 
ance. In this it differs from the older 
European nobility, which depends upon ex- 
ternals. The American noble is noble by 
virtue of an inner revelation. 

When I was a child of about seven I was 
taken to St. Cloud, and on that day the 
Spirit descended upon me and I became one 
of the Elect. It was in a great drawing- 
room, with miles of polished parquet floor- 
ing and hundreds of spindle chairs, gilded 
more completely than it would be thought 
possible to gild anything, — gold chairs they 
looked like,— and many crystal chandeliers, 
and many tall windows and many mirrors 
and cheval-glasses. I was struck dumb with 
delight, and I said to myself, 'This is the 
sort of thing that I like ! It is native to me ; 
I have always been waiting for this! It 
must be that I am a king !" 



GREEK GENIUS 

In this early experience of my own I seem 
to see an explanation of the American Col- 
ony in Europe. From the Vulgarian to the 
Inner Temple, the American Colonist in 
Europe feels that he is really at home. He 
is in Abraham's bosom. All the beginning 
of his life was an unpleasant dream. All of 
that early New York, all of that deadly Bos- 
ton, ne compte plus. 

The Inner Temple has, of course, a better 
developed metaphysical consciousness than 
the other two classes. The Inner Temple is 
the Flower of the Bean— ''the bean-flower's 
boon," as Browning w^ould say. It is the 
perfect gentian of a rootless flower, and it 
blossoms in the boudoir of a Spirit that lives 
m vacuo. These intellectuals have found 
their heaven, too. Why, they are as much 
at home in books and in pictures as the worm 
is in the chestnut. 



IV 
ABBES AND CUPS OF CHOCOLATE 

Now I must make a digression, at the risk 
of fatiguing the reader, and must tell him 
that there has always existed in Europe a 
whole society of critical cleverness which 

rsoen 



LA VIE PARISIENNE 

runs behind the progress of the arts like dogs 
at a fair. The parlour oracle was a com- 
mon character in Roman society, as one may 
see in Horace. So is the man that knows 
the last joke or the last news. It has always 
been a game in Europe to surprise people in 
the drawing-room, to give the quip, to show 
oneself to be au c our ant, to take the trick 
in conversation,— and, above all, to shun 
crudity. This game of shunning crudity is 
to-day a living part of the Roman Empire 
which shines in the drawing-rooms of every 
European capital, and which, by the way, 
anyone can learn to play in the course of 
two weeks. It is a shallow, foolish game— 
a bore of a game; but the bon-ton has al- 
ways played it, and always will. Men of 
real importance who move in the beau monde 
play it out of habit, and a whole world of 
insignificant people play it because it is their 
religion. 

This drawing-room world of social and 
aesthetic chatter draws such vitality as it has 
from the deep currents of national life that 
flow about it and over it. It is a fringe of 
those real intellectual worlds which lie in- 
visible in the great peoples of Europe. It is 
a sort of servants' dining-hall, which implies 
the existence of masters and of royal folk 



GREEK GENIUS 

somewhere else. Tolstoi shows this chatter 
world to us in one of its aspects, Thackeray 
in another, de Goncourt in another; and all 
of the moralists who have described it make 
you feel that this tavern of criticism and 
bibeloterie is a little wart or excrescence 
which grows on the body of Art. It is a 
parasite— perhaps a necessary parasite— 
which all healthy art supports without evil 
consequences. 

Now the Inner Templar from America 
gets into this tavern of criticism and thinks 
he is seeing life. He finds (at first almost to 
his surprise) that he is holding up his end 
with the rest ; no one resents him ; he is en- 
couraged ; no one knows that he is different 
from the others; he does not know it him- 
self. But the truth is that, unlike the others, 
he has no home, but must sit up all night 
w^hen the rest have gone to their families. 
He has no customs, no habits, no uncon- 
scious support from a world of his own. 
The things he eats are not his. His very 
toothpick is of a foreign model, and he 
speaks to his valet in French. After he has 
talked his proper chatter about Art, he may 
go to a hired room to work over Art. 



naos;] 



LA VIE PARISIENNE 



THE CREATIVE WORK OF ALIENS 

A MAN who writes is like a spider who 
draws a web out of his stomach : the thread 
of his own life is revealed in the process. 
Art is the most personal matter in the 
world; and nevertheless the artist is— as we 
shall see in a moment — a mere embryo en- 
closed in society as the frog's egg is held in 
its place on the surface of a pond,— pro- 
tected, fed, and controlled by those vital 
forces with which it is most immediately in 
contact. 

As we all know, it is the early years of life 
that most deeply impress all men, and most 
seriously influence the poet and the novelist. 
An artist is forever telling about his earliest 
impressions; and the whole power of his 
art, which increases with age and practice, 
is put to illustrating the thoughts and pas- 
sions of his earliest years. 

Let us now recall the problems which nor- 
mally occupy the minds of Americans who 
reside abroad. And note here that we are 
drifting towards the universal in these 
speculations, which concern themselves as 
1:3093 



GREEK GENIUS 

much with London as with Paris. The 
dear old maids from Baltimore, New York, 
and Boston who founded the American Col- 
onies in Europe,— the Forty-niners,— were 
always interested in cheap pensions. You 
paid six francs at one place, but they would 
not black the shoes there ; the coffee was best 
at No. 47, but you have quarrelled with No. 
47 and regretted having done so. In the 
course of time, when Art, and the self-con- 
sciousness of Art, began to creep into the 
American Colonies in Europe, this Art was 
coloured by the triviality of the life. The 
Art dealt with things that might be seen by a 
fly, stale things, spots and externals, the 
soul-problems of the lodging-hunter and of 
the tuft-hunter. There was no vigour, no 
passion, no big interest in this life, or in the 
reflection of this life in its works of art. 

It is not merely that the literary members 
of these colonies write about unimportant 
things. It is that all these colonists have 
nothing important to think about, and hence, 
when they write, they write chiffons. Their 
bards sing, not of arms and the man, but of 
petty miseries, pimples on the face of so- 
ciety, mean ambitions, empty hearts. The 
little blights and lichens of social life are put 
under a microscope and enlarged into 



LA VIE PARISIENNE 

hideous ugliness. And all this epidermic 
school of letters (which, by the way, is a 
peculiarly American product; no one else 
ever wrote in this manner before) is con- 
ducted with appalling seriousness and in 
pretended imitation of Balzac, and Flaubert, 
and I know not of whom. 

Here, then, comes the revelation of the 
great gulf that lies between the Inner Tem- 
ple and any normal intellectual life: the 
Inner Temple has no outer temple. It is a 
core without an apple. Your American 
novelist in London or Paris is shut into his 
studio with his dreams,— and he dreams of 
Americans abroad. And when he runs short 
of Americans abroad he is obliged to return 
to 1872 and to give pictures of Kentucky 
before the war. He cannot throb with the 
healthy emotionalism of European life; nor 
can he draw upon the contemporary life of 
his own people. His relation towards his 
own people has become hostile and queru- 
lous. His brain is starving for support from 
his fellow-men. 

The great djinn who does the work for 
the artist, the slave who draws the water for 
the hero while he sleeps, who mows the ten 
acres of corn in a night,— this mysterious 
friend is the Unconscious. And this Uncon- 

C310 



GREEK GENIUS 

sclotis is somehow a thing which other peo- 
ple share. It is the block out of which we 
are hewn, and the pit out of which we are 
digged. The Unconscious is the great um- 
bilical cord that holds a man in touch with 
the universe and permits the power of the 
universe to reverberate through him. How 
explain this phenomenon? How make a 
man believe in the importance of a force 
which must in its very essence always remain 
unconscious ? 

These floating Americans, whose cultiva- 
tion represents the wart without the body, 
have detached themselves from the great 
dynamo of life. If one could see what was 
happening in the souls of these people, one 
would long to cut them down like suicides. 
What the reasons may be for this loss of 
power in expatriated persons we do not 
know. Apparently nature speaks only 
through a crowd. There must be a great 
many individuals who all feel alike before 
any one of them can say a word that is true. 
There is ingenuousness at the bottom of all 
power; a real belief that your way of think- 
ing must prevail, because you know that 
everyone at bottom is like yourself, — this 
belief is what makes your words count. 

Consider Walter Scott's way of writing, 



LA VIE PARISIENNE 

or Napoleon's way of commanding. Con- 
sider a Frenchman's way of driving in a 
nail, or an Italian's way of eating macaroni. 
Consider the air with which an American 
rings a door-bell and then stands noncha- 
lantly on the door-step, waiting for the door 
to be opened. There is a whole-hearted and 
headlong manner of life which betrays itself 
in all these activities, and which makes us 
see and feel that the thing in hand is im- 
portant. 

There are certain flowers from whose root 
a long filament goes out, a hairy process 
which is called a biotic root. This biotic 
root is an insignificant, superfluous-looking 
string, and often is accidentally destroyed 
while the flowers are being transplanted; 
but when this superfluous-looking root is cut 
the plant dies. Now the quality which the 
expatriated American loses is somehow due 
to the loss of his biotic root; but to say just 
what the thing is or does, whether in horti- 
culture or in a spiritual sense, is beyond our 
power. 



D133 



GREEK GENIUS 

VI 
THE POOR INDIAN 

The terrible thing about Nature is that she 
operates but never explains. Nature lets a 
man die for lack of oxygen, but she never 
says to him : 'What you need, my dear fel- 
low, is oxygen." The scientist and his labor- 
atory are required to find the labels for the 
poisons of the world. We see certain evil 
symptoms, certain weaknesses and faint- 
nesses of nature, deficiencies of energy and 
dead spots ; but we can never be sure that we 
have properly accounted for them. If there 
is any truth in my diagnosis of the heart and 
brain troubles which attack Americans re- 
siding in Europe, then we must look a long 
way back for the causes. We must go back 
to Columbus' time, and perceive that the 
rush of Europeans to America and their 
segregation for a few centuries on a new 
soil made them peculiarly sensitive to certain 
home microbes, certain drawing-room dis- 
eases of Europe, from which their frontier 
life had been peculiarly free. When the 
Americans return to Europe the pleasures 
of the intellect become to them a danger, 



LA VIE PARISIENNE 

because they roll themselves in those pleas- 
ures as a cat rolls in valerian. The cult of 
cultivation, which is merely a becoming sort 
of fashionable cough to thousands of Eu- 
ropeans, runs straight into scarlet fever and 
typhoid v^ith the American visitors. The 
pose of refinement, the dread of crudity, the 
love of bibelots, become, as it were, mortal 
sins to the long-lost American. 

We must note one very interesting fact : 
the American who is in Europe selling 
steam-boilers or distributing Belgian relief, 
or even on some business connected with art 
or literature, does not show signs of this 
fussy sickness. He does his business and 
goes home. It is the man who stays in 
Europe in search of sensation that catches 
the disease. 

The disease in all its forms is Nature's 
punishment for the vice of seeking sensa- 
tion. The dilettantes of ancient Rome, who 
suffered from it, were people who wanted 
to draw a little more pleasure out of life 
than health would permit. ''We are all of 
us too clever!" says Montaigne; "and in 
order to grow wise we must become dull." 
Now Americans have not enough reserve 
power to indulge in any cleverness at all, with 
impunity. They exhibit the rarest variety 



GREEK GENIUS 

of the disease of cleverness which has ever 
been known, because they have lived in the 
wilderness till they have lost the power to 
take sophistication lightly. Sophistication 
is poison to them ; they die of it, as red In- 
dians die of whiskey. 

Our only road to strength in America lies 
through the building up of the arts and 
sciences in America, and in an increase in 
the general complexity of our social and in- 
tellectual life. Your intelligent American 
will stand more chance of becoming a sig- 
nificant intelligence if he babbles in the pur- 
lieus of Hoboken than if he hobnobs with 
the Sorbonne. He will then be able to re- 
tain his own point of view on entering 
Europe, and will not drop it in the ante- 
chamber of the first European house he 
enters. When he goes to Europe he will go 
as the business man does, bringing his own 
thoughts, his own wares, his own aims and 
habits with him and feeling no false shame 
as to his crudity. He will not be so im- 
pressed with the importance of small things, 
whether they be visiting-cards or the tittle- 
tattle of the intellectual classes, as he is at 
present. He will, in fact, have a self-re- 
specting and natural relation, instead of a 

Di63 



LA VIE PARISIENNE 

simian and nervous relation, towards the 
things of the mind in the Old World. 

After all, the typical American manufac- 
turer who comes abroad with his foolish 
wife and daughters and is held up to ridi- 
cule in the novels of the Anglo- and Franco- 
American literatures (this school of fiction 
seems to have only one theme) is a step 
nearer to true cultivation than the rest of 
the characters in the books, — a step nearer 
than the authors who write them; for this 
manufacturer is a part of a continent and 
of a tradition, a part of an unconscious 
force. The other personages are dried 
leaves. 



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